


how a resurrection really feels

by theheartischill



Series: help, i'm alive [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternative Mendings, Beaches, California, Depression, Drinking, Endgame Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, F/M, Happy Ending, Hauntology, Healing, Jogging, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Suicidal Ideation, Vernacular Magic, cultivation, for real this time!, proof of concept, spellcraft, sustainability, turn of the millennium indie rock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:33:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 337,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27025885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartischill/pseuds/theheartischill
Summary: “You know the worst part of getting exactly what you want? When you realize that only afucking assholewould have wanted it in the first place."(Or: On the West Coast, Quentin tries to figure it out.)
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater & Alice Quinn, Quentin Coldwater & Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh, Quentin/Coldwater/Various OCs
Series: help, i'm alive [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1880812
Comments: 539
Kudos: 212





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Story note:** This is the second and final part of the story that began with [damage control for a walking corpse](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25915906/chapters/62984770). You certainly may read it if you haven't read that, but it begins approximately thirty seconds after that one ended, so I can't promise it will make any sense!
> 
>  **Content note:** Once again I wrestle with the issue of How To Warn For This Dumb Show. As I said above, this picks up right where damage control left off, and you should assume that everything that was fucked up and bad re: mental health and questionable coping mechanisms in that story remains so when we start this one; some chapters may have more specific warnings, flagged at the top and explained at the bottom for those who wish to avoid them; as ever, you are welcome to get in touch [via Tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com) if you have anything specific you want to know about, or if you want any clarification. All that said — this is ultimately a gentler, more optimistic story than that was, and my hunch is that if you made it through damage control, you will be fine; the hardest parts are in the rearview.
> 
>  **Queliot note:** I swear on Jason Ralph's laugh lines that at the end of this story Quentin and Eliot are the hearts-and-sunshine stupid in love boyfriends they deserve to be. I would not deceive you about this. I am saying this up front because this story is long and a lot of things happen in it and some of them may not appear to be pointing in that direction! But all of them are, I promise. Quentin's just got a lot of shit to work through. Give him time.

Walking back through the wards around the house by the bay after Julia’s driven off, as alone as he’s been in his entire life, Quentin has a vision of what’s to come. He’ll settle into his new lodgings and here in the place where he’s chosen to stay, fortified by the boldness of his own decision, he will fix his fucking life. He’ll move on from the sting of his own self-injured pride and he’ll end the marathon pity party and he’ll just get his stupid shit together at last. He’ll trade cheap beer for organic smoothies with like wheatgrass for the antioxidants or whatever and late nights for early mornings and in the long daylight hours he’ll find his way to the person he’s supposed to be. He’ll read books and figure out a career path that will eventually end his financial dependence on his best friend’s trust fund and never again fuck a stranger whose name he can’t remember in the morning and eat a billion salads and like nine thousand fewer calories in sugar and grease and quit smoking and develop a taste for kombucha and have these epiphanies on the beach about what it’s really all about and when in a few weeks he has the answer and some practice behind him of being a functional adult he’ll go back to New York ready to rebuild the bridges he burned and step back into his actual life and be his old self minus the internal time bomb that set him on this path in the first place. Mended and exorcised, freshly made clean. He’ll be better and he’ll be smarter and more grown-up and a better daughter or — well, okay, that’s definitely a Rilo Kiley song, but. The concept is sound. Quentin pauses at the door of the mint-green house, under the birdsong windchime chirping its hello, to consecrate the moment in his mind, feeling awash with hope: New leaf, bitches. No more looking back.

So yeah, that lasts — what, like an hour? Not even.

Which in retrospect, he thinks, lying on the bed he guesses he’ll have to start thinking of as his, moving only to day-drink his way through the bottle of wine he left the house for exactly the fifteen minutes it took to acquire it and come back and occasionally to tell Netflix that yes he _is_ still watching _Arrested Development_ , like, god, even fucking algorithms can’t just let him live — like, he really should have known.

*

He started off strong. Or — he started off okay. He went back to his room and decided to unpack, the act of lifting clothes and assorted belongings from the bags they’d been stationed in to the dresser by his new bed a symbolic way to cement that this was for real: he was going to stop running. He was going to stay here until he figured out what that meant. And he had unpacked, in his typical haphazard fashion, taking a few minutes to toss objects loosely grouped by similarity with little regard for how they landed. When his bags were empty he had looked at the dresser and the desk against the opposite wall and felt a surge of satisfaction. Functional adulthood one, death wish zero.

Except. Except the drawers were kind of a mess of bunched-up shirts and half-folded jeans, which was how his drawers had always been, but like, what if that was the problem? What if there was some kind of deep soul-level connection between being the kind of person who never bothered to fold his underwear and being the kind of person who would do something like kill himself in the most embarrassing way possible because he couldn’t be bothered to stay alive? Julia, he thought suddenly, _always_ folded her underwear. Not that he had ever looked, but — he could just feel it. Eliot definitely did, and that he _had_ seen. Margo too, come to think of it, as he’d witnessed blushing and sputtering some night at the cottage his first year. And _Alice_ , forget it. Alice would sleep folded up in a drawer if she could. So, like, probably every person Quentin had ever truly loved was the kind of person who folded their fucking underwear, and although it seemed statistically unlikely that this was the source of the divide between people who knew how to live and whatever the hell he was, maybe it fucking was. How the fuck would he know?

So that was easy enough to address: just fold your fucking clothes, Quentin. Except he opened the top drawer to get started and was hit with a wave of exhaustion because — what was the fucking point? What was the point of preventing wrinkles in shirts no one he cared about was going to see him wear, and neatly stacking jeans that barely fit him now, and folding his fucking _underwear_ , not just today but like every single week from now until he died? What was the point of hanging on that long to fold his underwear and feel like shit, if there wasn’t going to be some reason it had all mattered in the end? If he was never going stand and see the noble purpose that had made all the suffering and effort and underwear-folding worthwhile. Which he was never going to do, because he had done that, and it had turned out to be this hideous grandiose delusion and also totally fucking suicidal, which didn’t even make sense because how could he want in one instant to be larger than life and also nothing, like, even the story of his dysfunction lacked internal cohesion, his life needed a better fucking editor, but that wasn’t the point, the point was he wasn’t going to do that again, and instead he was going to — what? What exactly was the fucking alternative to sitting here and listening to the voice saying _just stop just stop just stop just stop_ until finally he —

The alternative for today is drinking until he can’t stand up any longer and enough Mexican take-out to make himself sick and watching fetal-looking Michael Cera fall in love with his cousin, which, granted, was not the plan. But in his defense: he hates himself and wants to die and when the wine is gone it turns out even that isn’t enough to make him forget about it anymore. Maybe he gets one night to wallow in that, and then — tomorrow, fresh start. For real this time.

*

It sounds idiotic to say he forgot about hangovers, but, well — he sort of did. He got spoiled by ready access to Kady’s cure. When he wakes up the next morning to sunlight chiseling at the spot between his eyes with a taste in his mouth like the Sahara after a nuclear attack he regrets the night before with every last one of his dehydrated cells. It’s almost a nice break from regretting his entire life.

He manages — it’s a near thing — to lift himself up long enough to get some water in his mouth from the faucet in the bathroom sink without heaving, thankfully avoiding the other residents of the house on his way there and back, and even fishes out the bottle of ibuprofen he stored in the desk drawer — so far from his bed — in the wildly optimistic environs of twenty-four hours ago. It’s enough to send him back to sleep, snoozing in and out of weird dreams he can only remember in snatches involving Brakebills and Julia and his mom’s house and Eliot and a constant sense of dread and guilt that wakes him up sweating and anxious. By the time he’s awake for real and capable of sitting up without wincing, it’s half-past four in the afternoon, which. The day’s pretty much a wash at that point, right? Tomorrow, he tells himself, picking up a six-pack and a sandwich from a grocery store, which — whatever, baby steps. Tomorrow he’ll start over. He means it.

*

He gets as far as eating a bowl of cereal before noon in the company of other human beings — Toni, working at a crossword in pen over a mug of tea, and Nico, the tall mop-haired dishwater blonde in the room next to his, trying out various combinations of patching spells until he finds a pair that gets the coffee maker to work — and spends about thirty seconds feeling pretty proud of himself until it collapses like thin ice and he plunges right into the freezing dark of wondering where the fuck the bar is if this feels like meeting it. Is that really how bad things have gotten, that twenty minutes of raisin bran with oat milk and semi-public existence counts as some sort of achievement? Is this really where he’s landed, _again_? Is he really pathetic enough to have wound up back there and somehow still after all this time inhabiting his breakable brain failed to have seen it coming?

And it’s just — what the fuck kind of future is he supposed to be surviving for if he’s been here before and is here again and is going to spend his life, apparently, circling back down this exact drain in ever more spectacularly destructive ways, acting every single time like he is brand fucking new? He’s supposed to want to get his shit together so he can what — forget about it long enough to be taken totally off-guard the next time he pistol whips himself in a dark alley? How would it not be better to just get the worst over with now and —

He doesn’t bother resolving anything for the next day while he sits on the floor with a bottle of gin in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Possibly the actual literal least he can do at this point is stop lying to himself that he’s capable of change.

*

“So how’s it going in San Diego?”

“Oh, you know. Pretty well.” Quentin doesn’t really want to talk to Julia, but when she called him in the interstice between hungover and drunk he figured this was as good an opportunity to allay her fears as he was likely to get for a while. “What have you been up to?”

“Just settling in, getting the lay of the land.” Steadily expanding his mental roster of places to buy alcohol in the neighborhood because one part of staying put he hadn’t accounted for is that people might start to look at you funny if you show up to buy a dinner party’s worth of booze multiple nights in a row, which — he’s not fucking stupid. Or, he actually might be, but — yeah, he knows that the optics of that are… not great. There’s a voice in the back of his head that finds it maybe a little concerning, but the voice, infuriatingly, sounds of all people like Eliot, so he’s been trying not to hear it.

“That’s good!”

Julia sounds relieved. Good. That was the goal. Before she can inquire too deeply he asks, “So where are you now? Did you find someone else to work the removal with you?”

“Yeah, actually — Penny agreed to come along.” There’s a smile in her voice when she says this, which — Great. Wonderful. This is, objectively, good news for his dear friend Julia whom he loves very much. The fact that it fills him with anything other than joy only means that he is not a good person, which he knew, so — no big deal. “We’re in Portland right now — you and I should take an actual trip here one of these days, the magic scene is insane. So many people are doing really cool access work — there’s this spellshare that happens every first Sunday of the month at this anarcho-occult bookstore downtown. I’m hoping once I’m back in the city we can reach out to them and talk seriously about how to pool our resources and organize for some real change.”

“That’s awesome.”

“Yeah.” Her voice turns warm and a little too serious for his liking to say, “I’m really glad you’re doing okay, Q.”

“Yeah,” he says, taking a drag of his cigarette and wondering what it says that he can’t even summon the interest to entertain himself with a simple smoke ring spell. He used to like that kind of thing, he remembers: magic just to make it. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it just got old. “Me too.”

*

Sometimes when it’s gotten dark and he hasn’t bothered to turn the lights on he looks at the wide mirror someone left hanging on the wall above the desk and thinks about the Seam. Alice’s face, Everett’s voice. The plan that snapped into place in his mind like someone had gifted it to him, that felt like divine inspiration but was really just his old worst impulses dressed in shinier clothes. He thinks that when he looks back on that moment, newly clarified from the fog of his own pitiful myth-making, he should recall despair or exhaustion or grief, some amped-up version of the miserable ruminations that had previously drawn him to that dark ledge. The memory of that lost Quentin casting himself into death should swell with the echo of his familiar anguished self-loathing, pushed finally too far beyond what he could bear. That’s what anyone who heard that story would assume. And maybe on some level it’s even true. But he can’t dig up any compassion for that former self at some hypothetical breaking point, because when he really lets himself remember it, he knows: that’s not how it felt.

How it felt was: for twenty-five years, every second of every day had felt like a fight just to exist in his own ill-fitting skin, and for twenty-five seconds he had gotten to feel like he’d finally won. And he knows, he fucking knows it’s sick and wrong and ungrateful and weak to feel this way, but — but it’s also true: if no one had brought him back, he would never have had to learn he was wrong.

*

He wakes up on Friday just before one in the afternoon, California time, and before he even processes the fact of his own consciousness he realizes Eliot is getting out of therapy about now, in a time zone three hours and three thousand miles away. Quentin imagines it, watching the minutes slip by on his phone: now Eliot is dabbing his eyes with the Kleenex they always keep on those low tables; now he’s laughing self-deprecatingly to put his face back on before re-emerging in the world outside; now his therapist is smiling her kindly smile and he’s forcing himself to accept it; now they’re confirming logistics of payment and the next appointment; now Eliot is stepping out of the office, avoiding the gaze of the person scrolling through their phone in the waiting area outside, striding purposefully tall on those long legs through the lobby of the building and out onto the sidewalk. Now he’s slipping down into the subway, or else walking back to the penthouse, sweating in the summer heat, feeling unmoored and raw and a little proud of himself for like, showing up and doing the work, or whatever. Arriving at the apartment, softened and subdued, exchanging a quiet smile with whoever might be there or else relieved to find it empty. Bracing himself, maybe, for Quentin’s call. Maybe checking his phone every few seconds, not wanting it to ring but not wanting to miss it when it does. The curve of his knuckles jutting out from his hand curling around the blue case. His dark brow furrowing just slightly over his clear eyes with each silent minute.

Quentin — shouldn’t call. Right? Like, he can’t stop drinking himself into attempted oblivion or hiding in his room like some kind of feral raccoon or spending upwards of eighty percent of the day horizontal or failing to imagine any kind of livable future he might be able to create, but — it’s fucked up, what he’s been doing to Eliot. He knew that the whole time, probably, but if the anger hasn’t left him, the last of his self-righteousness extinguished itself alongside the myth of the hero of the Seam. Whatever Eliot did to him in the past, he deserves to be able to — let go. Move on. Whatever. At least one of them should. And maybe Quentin can’t, from him or them or anything else, but — he can do this much. He can decide, once a week, not to do the thing that would make it worse for someone else.

Eliot doesn’t call him, either. Which — of course he doesn’t. Quentin has basically provided him with a dissertation’s worth of reasons never to call him again. Which was what he wanted, so. It’s fine.

*

(Tucked into those twenty-five years were fifty more, fifty years that were small and hard and lonely and full of pain but became somehow through it all something other than a struggle just to live through, day by day. Fifty years that didn’t matter until they did, fifty years that mattered until Quentin decided to make fucking sure they didn’t anymore, fifty years that — ugh, he _really_ can’t go there. Not now, maybe not ever. Maybe what he needs is one of those mythical underworld rivers of forgetting — his gangrenous other life, poisoning his blood, finally amputated so he’d only need to learn to live with the ways he’s destroyed this one, and not the moments he tried and then refused to keep that other one alive.)

*

Someone is knocking on his door. In his half-asleep state Quentin thinks it’s Julia and believes momentarily that they’re back in college, like maybe she’s checking in on him to make sure he doesn’t miss an in-class essay? Or she needs her copy of _Beowulf_ back, or — “Come in.”

He manages to crack his eyes open just in time for reality to reassemble itself in his brain — the desk, the mirror, the white wooden blinds of the window in his room in the house by the bay — and Luisa pokes her head in just past his doorway. “Hey — sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Uh — no,” he lies, feeling stupid even as he does it because when you invite a crazy person to live in your house surely you have to be expecting them to act kind of crazy, but too embarrassed nonetheless to tell the truth. “Or — I was just reading something on my phone, must have drifted off.” He sits up, concentrating very hard on not letting his headache show on his face, absurdly grateful to have passed out fully dressed the night before. “What’s up?”

“Are you free this afternoon?” she asks. “Nico and I were supposed to go unmark a crew over in Clairemont, but —” She raises her voice theatrically. “ _Someone_ fucking _bailed_ on me —”

“I told you,” comes Nico’s muffled bass from the other side of the wall, “it’s a work thing —”

“You’re _freelance_ , you set your own hours —”

“Yeah, and I’m not about to turn down time and a half on my usual rate to emotionally babysit this guy for the forty-eight hours before we go live —”

“Whatever.” Luisa rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t look actually pissed. Quentin has a weird sense memory of sitting in Julia’s childhood bedroom, watching her fight with Mackenzie over whose turn it was with the Wii before the two of them agreed on cheese and crackers for a snack. “Anyway. We can reschedule, but I figured I’d ask if you wanted to sub in. It’s not far — maybe a twenty-minute drive, since Ray said we could use the car.”

Quentin does not want to do that, but he does not want to do fucking anything, so. Plus he feels like kind of a dick, hiding himself in his room after she was so nice to him. So he brushes his hair out of his eyes and says, “Yeah, sure thing. When did you want to get going?”

“Awesome,” Luisa says, with a quick grin. “I was thinking of driving out in maybe an hour, if that works for you?”

That is... just about long enough for some ibuprofen to start kicking in, so — “Sounds great.” He makes himself smile, hoping he looks gladder than he feels.

*

On the drive over to preempt his present state from becoming a topic of conversation he says, “So what do you do?” Then he feels like an asshole because — he should have just asked her, right? Like, a while ago? To indicate he gave a shit? He feels so out of practice with any of the ways people are supposed to behave, which was not exactly an area where he ever had much expertise to lose.

“I work at a local non-profit focused on sustainability,” Luisa says.

“Oh, nice,” Quentin says. “Magic, or —?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I mean we collaborate with other types of orgs, but. Right now most of my job is researching and brainstorming to figure out what kinds of wards or channels or other protections we might be able to set up to protect against or mitigate the effects of the fucking wildfires. We piloted a few techniques before the peak season last year and didn’t get hit as bad as we might have otherwise, but our quant team says we need more testing to prove it wasn’t coincidence, so we’re hoping this year to ramp up our implementation and see more improvements.”

“That would be great,” Quentin says, frantically trying to remember anything he might have read about wildfires in California. “Right?”

“It would,” she says. “Not just for San Diego, like — if we can show that what we’re doing here works, that’s proof of concept for something we could potentially take statewide.”

Quentin winces at the phrase, which is fucking nuts because, like, are completely normal segments of the English language just tainted for him permanently now? Because of things that came out of his _own_ stupid mouth? His own tongue, clumsy with an unfamiliar longing; his own words a year later in Eliot’s voice, made briefly miraculous by the joy of his choosing them. Both times suggesting the same thing: the presence of an unburied life that illuminated the hope of a future made of colors other than despair. Both times meaning nothing — worse than nothing; what’s the line? Sound and fury. A tale told by an idiot. An idiot too up his own ass to realize he was just telling the same story he had always been telling. The story where he got to be something other than exactly who he fucking was.

*

The group in Clairemont are people Luisa knows, and he doesn’t know if that alone keeps the conversation on their own usual ground or if she sent some considerate text telling them to back off, but no one asks about his death. It’s a relief he wasn’t expecting to feel, and the surprise of it shakes something loose in him. Even though he doesn’t have much to add to their exchange of local gossip, he feels a little more lifelike going through the gestures of personhood. Like a golem lurching slowly into alien motion.

Afterwards, he and Luisa get lunch at some organic panini place she likes not far from the house. While she’s waiting for her smoothie by the counter Quentin takes a picture of his plate to text Julia in the hopes that she’ll be heartened by the sight of probably the healthiest thing he has eaten all year.

“So how’s your life in California so far?” she asks when she joins him at the table.

“The house is great,” Quentin says, wanting to show his appreciation. “Thank you again for — opening it up to me.”

Luisa smiles but doesn’t say anything. It’s not quite an expectant silence, but — she’s giving him room, he knows, to find his way towards the other answers to her question. He bites at his bottom lip a moment, considering how honest to be, and remembers — how much he liked her, that first night on the beach. How easy she was to talk to, because she knew, like _knew_ , and she didn’t want anything from him except for him to see that. How their conversation had felt like the first air that had filled his lungs since waking up on Earth. When he decided to stay, wasn’t that part of what he was chasing?

Quentin says, fumbling with the words, “I’m not… in a great place.” She nods, not unconcerned but unsurprised; waits. “I haven’t been,” he goes on, “for a while, and I guess — I guess I knew that, on some level, but — things kind of came to a head, in a way, and I couldn’t, uh.” His throat tightens, thinking again of what he’d put Julia through, how long he’d acted unsorry. “Something had to change,” he manages. “So — so I did, right, I decided to stick around here, but…” He surprises a laugh out of himself, because it sounds so ridiculous to say it out loud. “Shockingly, that did not cause any of the actual issues to magically evaporate overnight.”

Luisa laughs, too. “Ugh, doesn’t that suck?”

“It _does!_ ” It’s weirdly invigorating to just complain about it, like he’s venting about the weather or something equally banal. “It sucks, like, _so_ hard that you can’t just — decide to get better, and then suddenly you’re all set. Like, I made this big, life-changing choice, and now I have to, what? Make more choices? _Do_ things?”

“ _Try_?” Luisa offers, with exaggerated disgust.

“Gross,” he says, grinning. This is good, he tells himself. He’s — he’s talking about it, he’s doing the thing everyone says you should do, and maybe it’s not offering any actionable advice yet but it’s reminding him that he can laugh and talk and smile. That’s — got to be part of the endgame here, right? He pushes himself to go a little further down this path people like him are supposed to follow, sifting through the swamp of his recent wallowing for something he can articulate. “You know the worst part of getting exactly what you want?”

“I can come up with a couple of answers,” she says, raising an amused eyebrow. “But what’s yours?”

“When you realize that only a _fucking asshole_ would have wanted it in the first place.” Quentin shakes his head, laughing mirthlessly. “I mean, if you told my sixteen-year-old self that he would one day die saving the world with his beautiful girlfriend at his side, he would’ve nut himself on the spot.” Immediately he goes into a full body cringe. “Sorry, that was uh — I’m not really a hundred percent cleared for human consumption right now —”

Luisa, mercifully, is laughing it off. “No, I get it. You got to _be_ every Harrison Ford character, except with bonus tragedy.”

“Yeah, something like that,” he says, relieved. “And the thing is, I really, truly thought I’d outgrown that. I thought I’d come to my senses and realized that it was — narcissistic, and self-absorbed, and totally juvenile, and like probably sexist somehow, but… when the shit hit the fan, that was still the story that made the most sense to me.” He turns the reality of it over in his head, marveling like it’s some cursed artifact. Which would make him, what, Indiana fucking Jones? Jesus, he’s pathetic. “Everyone thinks I’m this big hero, but — I’m just a dick who saw a chance to play the part. And the worst part is, until like a week ago, I let myself think they were right. Because —” He lifts his palms up helplessly. “Because that was a nicer story than the one where I somehow managed to prove I was more special than anyone else _and_ give up on life, in one fell stroke.”

“I mean,” Luisa says, dark eyes kind, “it feels pretty hard to blame you for taking a while to process your actual death.”

“That’s the thing, though,” Quentin says. “For months, I’ve been thinking that if I was feeling fucked up, it was dying that did it. But the truth is, I died more at peace than I have ever felt in my goddamn life.” In this goddamn life, anyway, he mentally amends with a twinge, which — _that’s_ a whole other clusterfuck that maybe he can untangle if he lives to like, forty. “When I died, I had a sense of purpose. I knew my life had meant something. I knew that whatever else I had fucked up along the way, when it really counted, I finally made the right call. And the second I woke up, all of that went away.”

He’s expecting Luisa to reassure or remind him that just like the eight billion people on earth less confused about this than he is, actually his life does mean something, even minus a glorious sacrifice. The obvious truth of this notion somehow does not make it any easier to swallow. Actually it makes it worse, because like, eight billion people are managing to cope with this reality, and yet here he fucking is. But she just nods understandingly and says, “That sounds like a nightmare.”

“Something like that,” he says. He pushes the greens around on his plate with his fork. He should probably eat them but he feels a weird visceral confusion at the prospect, like after his steady diet of salt and high-fructose corn syrup his body has forgotten the concept of things like vitamins and fiber. “And now I’m here, and that feels like — the least awful decision I have made in a really, really long time, but it’s like — I’m supposed to be getting my shit together and not only do I clearly not know how to do that, I don’t know how to _want_ that. I don’t even really know what it is I’m supposed to be wanting. Because I can’t imagine —” His chest stutters as he realizes what’s coming into his mouth, like his body resents the betrayal of being forced to see. “I can’t imagine anything that would feel as right as that moment felt.”

“Fuck,” she says sympathetically.

“And if that’s the case —” He doesn’t finish the thought; he can see in her face that he doesn’t need to. Ducking his eyes, he says, “Sorry, that was, uh — I’m sorry.”

“Hey,” Luisa says gently, “you don’t need to apologize for that. Not to me, at least.”

Her tone reminds him of Julia in that moment, which makes him feel worse, because — because it does ease something in his shoulders to hear her say it, and he knows from long experience that if Julia had said it he would have felt an ugly thorned resentment curling under his skin. What the fuck is wrong with him, he wonders, that he can only accept a novel and diluted form of the grace she’s been offering him his entire life. How is it that every good thing feels bad, and the only thing that feels good is — “Thanks,” he manages. He spears a bit of the side salad onto his fork and puts it in his mouth. It tastes like licking dirt.

*

By the time they return to the house, Quentin is torn between trying to prolong his minute spark of humanness by clinging to Luisa like he’s a shy thumbsucker on the first day of kindergarten all over again, and desperately wanting to run to his room and shut the door before she realizes he’s outworn his welcome. But at the dining table the other four residents are setting up some tabletop game, and Nico invites them to join as soon as they walk through the door, and Quentin doesn’t really want to play what the box promises is _An evening of strategy, betrayal, and MAGIC!_ , but Luisa accepts immediately and he would feel like a dick so blatantly avoiding all of them by rushing upstairs, so he takes the empty chair and listens to Nico explain the rules. There are worse guiding principles, he figures, than _don’t be a dick_. It’s one he’s really been undervaluing lately.

The game, like most tabletop games, is insanely boring until very suddenly it’s not; Quentin can never spot where the switch happens, but he’s relieved a few rounds in to find himself high-fiving Cynthia, a thirty-something he’s barely crossed paths with since moving in and apparently a formidable Illusionist, after they successfully stage a coup that leaves Ray and Luisa in the dust. They wind up playing into the evening, ordering a pizza with half a garden’s worth of toppings and breaking out a case of hard seltzer as the hours roll on, and by the time they’re cleaning up with laughing recriminations and dispersing back to their own quarters for the night, he feels — better? Maybe. Like, he gets to his bed and continues drinking because he’s pretty sure he’s too sober to fall asleep, which is not ideal, objectively, and he still doesn’t know what to do with his life or how to act like the person he’s supposed to be, and there’s still nothing on earth that sounds as good as death, but — he can imagine waking up the next morning, maybe even a little less hungover than usual, and doing something like that again. Spending multiple consecutive hours engaged in activities other than chain-smoking while mentally outlining every idiotic/hateful/embarrassing/pathetic/shitty thing he has done in the past few months/several years/entire lifetime. That’s not much, but it’s more than he’s fallen asleep with since the night before Julia left.

It’s a start.

And it — kind of works, actually! He wakes up earlier than his body would prefer and forces himself to drink water and Advil until he’s well enough to clothe himself and wander downstairs and find Cynthia wearily wielding tuts against the faulty coffee maker and make himself some toast with — soy butter? Sure, why not. He drinks coffee and asks about the novel she’s writing and the forgery gigs she uses to pay the bills — “It’s less exciting than it sounds, honestly,” she explains, shaking her head so that her cherry-red curls bounce around her dark face, “these days it’s mostly universities contracting me to fake paperwork for their students from unmagical families” — and when Luisa speeds by to tell them she has to go feed a friend’s cat but they’re invited to brunch later, he makes himself ignore the fifth wheel alarm bells set to a permanent hair-trigger in his brain to say he’ll be there, because — this is why he came here, right? To remember how to do this? “This” meaning “life”? Which he has, real talk, always kind of sucked at, so — so fine, he feels awkward about potentially abusing someone else’s generosity, and he drinks one or _maybe_ two too many bottomless mimosas, but he doesn’t say anything totally embarrassing and he doesn’t feel an _overwhelming_ urge afterwards to lie on the floor until he begins to decompose, so — it’s something.

In bed that night, drifting off drunk but compared to how he’s usually been passing out really like _basically_ sober, if you think about it, he thinks that possibly a new leaf was too optimistic, for where he’d been and how long he’d been there. Too big a leap to make at once. He’s not Indiana fucking Jones; he doesn’t have that much faith. Maybe his mantra needs to be more like this: he’s remembering how to live. One day at a time. Which — that’s the motto, he’s pretty sure, for Alcoholics Anonymous, so — maybe not in those words, because — not that it _matters_ , exactly, it’s just — whatever. He pushes the thought aside, swallowing with an unaccountable guilty flush along the back of his neck against the leftover taste of wine in his mouth. The principle stands. He’s remembering how to live. Bit by bit.

He is. Step by painstaking step. He gets up before noon and then he does that again, several days in a row, sometimes substantially before noon, waking up every day feeling the echo of the previous night’s intoxication but not debilitated by it. Something curls in his stomach uncomfortably when he takes out the recycling as per the chore wheel and feels a visceral relief that no one else has been tasked with witnessing how many bottles he’s going through on his own, but he figures his alcohol intake has gotta be down at least ten percent across a three-day average, and maybe that’s enough for now. He sets a rule that he has to wait at least an hour between cigarettes and mostly waits way longer than that. He eats toast with soy butter and drinks coffee from the increasingly erratic coffee maker (Nico, jabbing it with a little Krugstein Ballast, which Quentin thinks is nuts until it fucking _works_ , like, what have they _done_ to that thing — “Mother _fucker_ piece of shit, Toni, can we please commit to a new one already, I know we don’t like waste but at some point you’ve gotta call it”) and helps out with the parts of cooking that don’t require any actual skills when someone’s volunteered to cook for the house. A field researcher moves in at the start of July, a hauntologist named Rishi getting his PhD from Featherstone University in Maine, and Quentin introduces himself without freaking out, although he’s relieved that his name elicits no visible response. He cannot summon up yet the will to wander anywhere unless he’s following someone else, but he walks out back onto the beach a few times, to try to channel the instinct he first felt watching the bay and also to prove to his body that he is not a vampire who will perish under direct sunlight. Back at the house, he hangs out on the couch in the den to watch Almodóvar movies with Cynthia, who says his visuals get her in the right headspace for writing, and _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ with Nico, who was obsessed with it in high school and wants to see if it holds up, and Quentin’s attention span is pretty shot but he’s getting used to sitting next to someone for an extended period of time without shoving anything in his mouth more damaging than some baked pita chips and roasted red pepper hummus, or like possibly a lot of baked pita chips and roasted red pepper hummus, and maybe a White Claw or two if it’s past five and the other person started drinking first, which — it feels like progress. It does. He’s not yet a person who can do things like “make plans for the day,” but waking up on Friday as his head clears he thinks he might walk around the beach, maybe even swim, ask Ray if he wants an extra set of hands for the grocery trip he’s been mentioning, see what Luisa’s thinking for Friday night plans, and it feels like some corner has been turned. Enough so that when he has what feels in the moment like a genius insight to slice a banana for the top of his toast and texts a picture to Julia so she’ll know he is getting some potassium, or whatever bananas have that’s good for you, and she sends back the party-hat smiley and a blue heart, he doesn’t even feel the twinging sense that he’s conspiring to mislead her. Like, yeah: a week ago he couldn’t get out of bed, and now check him out, eating fruit and whole-grain bread and — protein? Soy has protein, right? — and it’s not even ten yet. Chronic depression can suck his dick.

So, obviously — _obviously_ — that’s when fucking Eliot fucking Waugh fucking calls him out of fucking nowhere. Because — fuck! Because fuck his entire stupid life, is why. Fuck him, and fuck Eliot, and fuck everything between them that Quentin has tried so many ways to kill but refuses to stay dead.

*

When his phone buzzes in his pocket while he’s sitting on the porch steps out back, he reaches for it assuming it’s Julia, pleased to be able to honestly report that he is absorbing vitamin D and seaside air. But it’s Eliot’s name on the screen, and Quentin freezes, watching it ring, feeling like the mechanisms of his body have gone askew. Like his heart is pumping too much blood into the ether because his limbs have disappeared.

He almost refuses the call. But — he can’t imagine why Eliot would be calling him and the most obvious possibility is that something is really wrong, so — he should pick up? Just in case? Which — is fine. His ex-boyfriend is calling him to impart some terrible news that will have the silver lining of distracting from the sound of his voice, or else he’s calling for some other unfathomable reason, and Quentin is doing better so he can just — find out what that is, and be normal about it, and then hang up and return to the reason he deposited himself three thousand miles away to begin with, which was to move on with his fucking life. Sure. “Just be normal,” he says out loud to himself, which is admittedly not an auspicious start, but — trying to ignore the inexplicable heat beneath his throat he presses the green button and holds the phone to his ear and waits.

There’s a long silence. Quentin watches the waves, trying to breathe in time with the steadiness of their rhythm. Finally he hears Eliot’s voice, uncertain: “Hello? Quentin? Can you hear me?”

“I was trying to come up with a less dickish way to answer the phone than ‘does your therapist know you’re calling me,’” Quentin says. “Uh. _Hi_ , I guess, is what I wanted to say.” He rests his head against his knees. Very normal so far. He’s doing a super job.

Eliot kind of laughs. Quentin’s throat tightens at the sound. “Hi.” Quentin’s not sure if it’s his turn to talk or not. He’s searching for a polite way to ask _why the fuck are you calling me_ when Eliot says, “I know we kind of left things on a bad note the last time we talked. Last week I was kind of relieved not to hear from you, honestly. But then it seemed like you weren’t calling again this week and I got… worried, I guess.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t know what to say to that. _I’m fine_ seems appropriate but wildly unconvincing.

“Julia told me you’re staying in California?”

Eliot sounds — curious, tentative. His eyebrows lifting, his wide-open eyes. “Yeah, for a bit. Trying to — screw my head back on straight, or something.” Quentin cringes. “Uh. Poor choice of words. Just — you know, getting some rest.”

“That’s — I mean that seems good.” Unsure but wanting to believe; probably nodding, even though Quentin can’t see.

“Yeah.” He has no idea what’s going on.

There’s a hesitation in which Quentin pictures Eliot biting his lip the way he does before saying something he’s scared to say but has convinced himself he has to. “Look I don’t — things have been weird, right, and uh — difficult, and, and we should probably stop with all the, uh…”

Eliot’s uncharacteristically bashful, trailing off, which almost makes Quentin smile, which then almost makes him cry. “Phone sex,” he fills in helpfully.

“Right.”

“Weird, angry, kind of mean” — Quentin sighs — “admittedly insanely hot phone sex,” he adds, because — because there is something very wrong with him deep inside. Because if anyone knows that it’s Eliot, so why bother hiding it. Because of whatever fucking psychological gravity Eliot still exerts over him that makes it impossible for him to just shut his fucking mouth.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, quiet. “That. I mean I just — and like I take total responsibility here too, you know, it was very much a two to tango sort of situation, so I’m not — it just doesn’t seem like it’s good for either of us, you know? For — maybe different reasons, but. So for both of our sakes, I really think we should — not. Anymore.”

“Yeah.” Quentin thought that was implied when he didn’t call last week, but maybe New Eliot needs to spell things out. Maybe it’s a therapy thing. Boundaries, or whatever.

“Especially since —” The catch of his breath in the curve of his throat. “I meant what I said way back when, Q. Your friendship means so much to me. So if that’s still… an option, if I haven’t blown it —”

“I’m sorry,” Quentin cuts in before he can think better of it, because Jesus, Eliot is fucking _pathological_ with this shit. “You think _you’ve_ blown the possibility of us being friends?” He feels bad laughing, because it’s not actually funny, it’s kind of sad, but — “What the fuck, Eliot.”

“Well, I know that —”

“No, stop —” Quentin shakes his head to himself. “You should, and I’m not saying this to be an asshole, you should legitimately bring this up with your therapist. You should tell her, _I hooked up with my ex, and I was completely honest and very straightforward about my feelings, and in return he spent two months actively trying to alienate everyone who had ever given him the time of day, especially me, and somehow, at the end of all of this, I still thought I might be the problem here_. Like, dude, do you hear yourself? Even I can tell that’s nuts.”

“Okay, well.” The little flick of his chin side to side, quick and brief. “I mean, I know you’ve said — you’ve said how you feel, but I also know you — you kept fucking calling me, Quentin.” He doesn’t sound pissed here, or even smug. More like — plaintive. A little confused.

“I did keep calling you,” Quentin agrees. He doesn’t even realize until after he’s said it that actually, a week ago, he hadn’t. He could point that out, but it doesn’t seem worth it. It doesn’t outweigh the truth, which is that he kept calling Eliot because he couldn’t fucking stop.

“So — I thought I would call, and say — you know, what I just said, and then if — then maybe, we could… talk. Hash things out, if that’s something you want, but we don’t have to, I know — I think we both know where things stand, now. So maybe we could start fresh. Just talk and be chill and — just have a conversation. If you wanted to.”

If he wanted to. Quentin tries to imagine how this would go: listening to Eliot’s descriptions of memorable Fillorian encounters, maybe his opinion of some movie he watched on a night off. Telling him in return about — what? About brunch and board games and walks on the beach? About drinking himself to sleep and flinching every time he catches his reflection? About how he doesn’t want to touch Eliot ever again but he still, still, still can’t stop thinking about how it felt, and at this point maybe it’s not Eliot’s fault but sometimes it sure fucking feels like hating him? About how even sitting here now he doesn’t know if when Eliot’s name came up on the screen he wanted to knife him through the side and watch him die or run to Fillory so they could make out for hours like teenagers in some proverbial attic? About how sometimes he wakes up with his head filled with the elegant angles of Eliot’s fingers around his dick and sometimes with those same fingers pressing tight against his windpipe and sometimes with Eliot’s throat choking in his own grip or his nails bloodied from reaching into Eliot’s chest cavity and digging out his heart with his bare hands? “I honestly don’t know if I can.”

“Oh.” There’s a sadness in it, but sadder than that is how poorly he tries to conceal it. Quentin doesn’t know if he wants to yell at him for being an idiot or tell him he doesn’t need to lie. “If that’s how you feel —”

“No, I mean —” Quentin laughs again, even though nothing is funny. “Eliot, I saw your name on my screen and I forgot the word _Hi_. I literally don’t know if I’m physically capable of having a normal conversation with you right now.”

“Oh.” Soft, short. His long lashes blinking fast.

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “And I’m — I’m trying to, you know. Figure out how to deal with my shit without just — pushing it onto other people, so. I feel like I should probably… play it safe for a while, or whatever.” Avoid inflicting any further wounds by removing the opportunity. He recalls suddenly the hospital, any of the hospitals: handing over the pen in his pockets, snaking the cord out of his hoodie before he could put it back on. 

“Right.” Gentle, lifting upwards. “I think — I think that’s really good, Quentin.”

Eliot sounds, like, legitimately proud of Quentin, which — fuck everything. Quentin’s throat tightens. “We’ll see. Or, I mean — thanks.”

“Well,” Eliot says, “I want —” He cuts himself off. Quentin wonders if he didn’t want to finish the sentence or didn’t know how to. “If you ever — or if there’s any — you know how to find me, if… You know where I am.”

“I do.” He does. He always has. He can’t stop knowing.

The conversation is pretty much over, now, but neither of them hangs up. Quentin doesn’t know why even now, even knowing it’s what he needs to do, it’s such an effort to finish what is now a real good-bye. He should say something, he thinks; he should tell Eliot he does want to be friends, eventually, and that he’ll call him one day, even if it’s in like maybe seven years when all the cells in Quentin’s body have become cells that never loved him, and certainly that he’s sorry for everything he’s done. It stung, apologizing to Julia, he remembers, but like a cleansing pain. Like he was ridding himself of some jagged splinter that should never have been there. But he can’t make any of the things he should say come to his mouth. Behind every _sorry_ is still coiled a _how fucking dare you_. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever forget how he loved Eliot or forgive Eliot for making him know how that felt. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever want to be Eliot’s friend. That hurts, he realizes. More than he would have expected it to when he was proclaiming its truth to anyone who would listen. It hurts to think Eliot took up so many rooms in Quentin’s heart, and maybe they really are all gone.

Eliot says, “Did I ever tell you how I got out of the happy place?”

“The what?”

Eliot chuckles lightly. “That’s a no. That day, in the park…” Quentin closes his eyes, even though that’s not how memories work. Eliot: Eliot alive, alive, alive… “I didn’t even know I was possessed, for a long time. I was in — in the cottage, actually, or the cottage in my brain. Just this kind of endless summer with Margo my imaginary friend. And then this — the guy the monster took before me — he kind of filled me in, and he told me what I needed to do to — get out, briefly. Long enough to tell you I was still alive in there. Because I knew… I knew that if you knew I was there, you’d rescue me.”

Quentin flinches at this, lets it go. “So what was the secret?”

“I had to go into my memories — like the really bad ones — the worst one, actually. Or — the one I was trying hardest to pretend I’d forgotten. And I had to — look at it, I mean really look at it, for the first time. Really look at _me_. Watch what had happened and what I’d done and why. I had to understand who I’d been, then, and who I should have been instead. I had to look at — the worst of myself, and understand that — it had been a choice. Even if it didn’t feel, at the time, like I had any other options. And once I really _knew_ that, like in my body knew that — that it _was_ a choice, and I could have chosen differently… this door appeared. And I stepped through it, and you were there.”

“Wow,” Quentin says. He can’t resist: “Don’t you love it when the metaphors turn out to be literal like that?” A parting gift, a final blow: he can’t tell the difference anymore, with him and Eliot.

Eliot laughs. “I feel like that trick gets kind of cheap after the first couple times. But it was convenient then.”

Quentin thinks about his defective hands and his faulty magic, how he used himself so badly the deepest part of him stopped working. Thinking: I loved you so much and I hated you so much that something inside me broke. He tries to imagine one day telling Eliot about that, like Eliot is telling him now: _Did I ever tell you how I got my discipline back? Well…_ He wonders what would need to go in that blank. If he’ll ever find it. “So what was your worst memory?” He winces. “Sorry, that was — force of habit. Obviously you don’t need to tell me.”

“I probably should tell you, one of these days,” Eliot says musingly. “But not right now, I don’t think.”

Quentin lets himself wonder about it, just for a second. Something with his shitbag father, probably. Or maybe from the first months in Fillory, all that shit with the weight of the crown and the angry populace and his dead kid. God. Eliot’s got fucking options. “I should let you go,” he says finally. “You probably have, like, things to do.” A life to live, that doesn’t involve him. The way Quentin had planned for, again and again, and never been able to make stick.

“Yeah,” Eliot says. Quentin knows he’s agreeing just to agree and hates that he knows that even as he appreciates the concession. “Take care of yourself, Q.”

“That’s the plan,” Quentin says. They’re on the line in silence just slightly too long before Quentin finally hangs up and puts his phone back in his pocket.

He sits on the porch steps, looking out at the bay: blue and shining on a sunny day. He should go for a swim to clear his head, spend some time as immersed in nature as possible. He should go inside and see if Cynthia is ready for lunch yet. He should watch a movie or make himself useful or call Julia and give her the undeniable good news that he’s officially no longer calling his ex-boyfriend once a week to metaphorically run them both over with a train.

He should feel good, he thinks. He did something right, just now, he knows; something that counts more than some game night or a fucking banana on toast. This is what he came here to do: fix his life, undo his wrongs, stop blowing up the same ruins over and over again. This is progress, real progress. A new leaf, a fresh start. Hope that the future might be something other than their knotted past. It should — energize him, or reassure him, or —

— sometimes he would blink his eyes open in the cottage in the woods and Eliot would be next to him warm and solid awake already and watching, just watching him sleep, like in his whole lifetime of reaching for the thing that would fill the gash inside of him laid there young and never fully healed he had woken to find that on this morning for a few minutes the sight of Quentin’s unmoving face was enough, like after all his years of frantic grasping he had discovered that he could live on only this, and when he saw that Quentin was awake he would smile with his eyes catching the light and Quentin could not believe, a fresh miracle every time, could not believe his life had brought him to be loved like that —

— he’s drunk on the floor beside his bed two hours later and honestly, he doesn’t even have the energy to feel bad.

*

He drags himself out of the house in the late afternoon, but he’s doing it to avoid the house’s casual Friday night discussion about evening and weekend plans so it hardly feels like a victory. He doesn’t tell himself where he’s going until he’s walking up along Riviera following the curve of the bay north, but by the time he pulls out his cracked phone to find the nearest bar it feels like he’s already there. Google wants him to go further than he feels like it for a normal bar, but the HDGE app offers up the variant on a Jones Uncloaking used for a speakeasy pretending to be a rental agency not too far. It occurs to him ordering his first drink of the night and severalth of the day that number one mysteriously disappearing on his roommates/hosts is maybe a dick move and number two if this is the closest hedge bar to them, not only might they show up here anyway but anyone he meets here might be someone he runs into in the future, which means that if as a hypothetical example he fucks someone and then walks out while they’re in the bathroom because he’s having a panic attack about the existential dissonance between his body which is nominally alive and his brain which feels well over halfway to death, it might get back to the people he lives with that he is a slutty asshole. He tries to make any of this matter to him but he can only get it to matter as much as anything other than the persistent sense that he is being devoured from within by a particularly vicious breed of scorpions ( _Scorpio is the symbol of sex, and Scorpios are passionate lovers; the most sensually energetic of the signs_ — fuck astrology, seriously), which is to say not a fucking whit.

By the time he’s on a king-sized bed fucking a blonde with the muscular build of a dedicated student athlete (Brakebills kid, learned she was a magician at her interview last September and consequently has no idea who he is, which spares him the inevitable humiliation of learning what he would have done if she had) in the beach house she and some friends from school have rented to celebrate surviving their first year, he feels like he’s watching a movie he’s seen so many times he can only focus on the flaws. Like watching Star Wars and thinking, _How is it not common knowledge that Darth Vader used to be Anakin Skywalker? If Chewie fought under Yoda’s command, why is Han so skeptical about the Force? Why doesn’t the Death Star just blow up Yavin like it did Alderaan?_ Only instead it’s more like, _Why did you commemorate finally getting some fucking closure with your ex-boyfriend by falling dick-first onto the first available naked body? Does she find it a turn-off that she could probably beat you in arm-wrestling because you’ve spent as much of your second life as humanly possible lying down and self-medicating with alcohol and carbs? Do you think you get more of an ego boost from fucking a hot chick than taking home a guy because figuring out you were bisexual at fourteen somehow didn’t stop you from spending all of high school internalizing the sexist and objectifying cultural construct of the nerd guy who can’t get a girl to talk to him, and, follow-up question, if so, do you hate women because of your issues with your mother, or is blaming your mother for your defects as a grown man just another form of misogyny?_

She’s panting along contentedly beneath him but he has the sense her sounds are shifting towards the less authentic, while he’s at that awkward spot where he should be close to coming but he’s not actually getting further despite thrusting deep into her, fast, because he’s wasted or because neither the booze nor his dick nor her breasts nor her breathy shouts of his name are shutting up his fucking brain ( _Is the fact that you’ve always used sex to turn off your pathological thought spirals and now it’s only making them worse actually ironic, or only Alanis-ironic, and how sure are you that you know the difference? Why did you think you could get into Yale?)_ or because it’s been going on long enough that his probably half-atrophied thighs are tiring along with his midsection and the burn in stomach is drawing attention to the way the skin under his belly button is pressing out newish-ly against her, seriously, like Olympic-figure-skater–taut abs, and he should probably ask if she wants to get on top in terms about how he wants to better see how hot she is or whatever but some idiotic, fine, _masculinity complex_ , fuck you yet again Eliot, congratulations on being the world’s foremost expert on ways Quentin Coldwater is screwed up, very marketable field you’ve gone into, have a nice life, some stupid pride refuses to let him succumb to his lack of fucking core strength with a girl who showed up at the bar wearing a faded tank top from her high school soccer team reading CHEAT ON YOUR BOYFRIEND, NOT ON YOUR WORKOUT, plus then she’d have a better view ( _Pop quiz! What’s more unattractive: your body, or finally embracing your destiny as an adult so neurotic he won’t have sex with the lights on? Trick question, it’s definitely both_ ), so he rolls his eyes at himself minutely and breaths out, “Is that good for you?” and when she says, nodding rapidly, “Uh-huh,” he — takes a moment to catch his breath, Jesus — and says, hoping it comes out more sexy-cocky than hideously needy, "How good, huh?” Hearing behind his ears _So good, Q, so good, exactly right, you’re good, the best, the best..._

And, small mercies, she gets the hint, putting some feeling into it, “So good, baby, you’re fucking me so good with your cock,” so on and so on, and the impersonal familiarity of the words like some pornographic Hallmark card sends a flash of embarrassment along his neck but in this context that’s close enough and he finally comes into her, breathing hard. Breathing really hard. It feels like it takes longer than it should for his pulse to slow back down.

Quentin tries to sound as pleasant as possible making up that he has a dentist appointment early the next morning ( _Why a dentist? Wouldn’t a person with a dentist appointment at nine on a Saturday avoid spending the night before drunk in someone else’s house? Is this about your thing with your mouth?_ ). The blonde says she’s in town through the end of July if he wants to hook up again, writes her number on his wrist using an elegantly executed Coulson’s Marker. Her name is Melissa, apparently.

Back at the house he tiptoes in, grateful to find everyone else is either out or asleep, and takes a long shower, standing under the water until he’s woozy from the heat and the exhaustion and the alcohol draining from his system. He leans against the sink to steady himself, watching the steam clear to reveal his face in the mirror, wearily unimpressed, and remembers that at the Seam he had turned to the mirror and been grateful to see himself for the first time in his life. That is so objectively fucked up that for a second he wonders if maybe the miracle isn’t that he came back to life but that he made it as long without dying as he did. He had looked at himself and seen the eyes of a hero, of a guy doing what he needed to do: brow set and eyes steady and hands poised, moving on every scripted beat.

Now he looks in the mirror and his reflection says: _You are a douchebag._

And the thing is he’s thought that uncountably many times in his life, in uncountable variants — _asshole idiot fuck-up piece of shit_ — and he’s been told a million times by a million professionals the kinds of things he’s supposed to say when those thoughts crop up, but if you look at the evidence, like if you really line up the things he’s said and done and wanted and felt lately, is it really worth arguing anymore? Even if it wasn’t true before, how could it be anything but true now? What the fuck else has he spent his new life doing if not determinedly, methodically giving himself proof that he was right all along?

*

It’s not that he “wants” to “die”; it’s just that nothing fucking matters like that one shining moment where he thought dying did. It’s that he could drag his ass out of bed and take a shower and eat some fucking toast and make pleasant chit-chat and congratulate himself some more on making an adult decision re: the Eliot situation and watch movies and read books and maybe it would feel better, a little, and god knows he can’t imagine it feeling worse, but it wouldn’t come close to knowing like he thought he had known. To feeling the universe reach into his chest and at last slot the misplaced piece into the latch where it had always belonged so that he moved easy and smooth. He feels branded by the rightness of that moment, a scar that began festering when he learned it had been a lie he told himself, and he can’t imagine what amount of risotto-making and morning-seizing and task-achieving is ever going to ease that burn.

So why not sleep till three and get up for half a box of cereal and sleep some more? Why not lie in bed giving himself liver damage like some perverse homage to a version of the boy he loved who doesn’t even exist anymore? Why not text fucking Melissa at one in the morning for sex he can’t even pretend to enjoy anymore but is at least a different and moderately distracting way to feel horrible and then go back to the house and stand in the kitchen in the dark eating half a loaf of bread out of the bag because it’s easier to fall asleep hating himself for that than hating himself for all the other things he hates himself for? If nothing makes living any less hard and no amount of effort makes it feel good then why bother trying to break the habits that make it seem easier for at least a few minutes at a time? Why not just sink into the quicksand reality that he’ll never be okay and then at least maybe he’ll feel less goddamn tired from the endless losing fight?

Why the fuck not?

*

He doesn’t even have the mental energy for rewatching sitcoms anymore but he’d still rather die than, well, many things, including be alone with his thoughts, so he starts spending every waking hour blasting music in his headphones like the angsty teen he once was, a particularly juvenile form of self-indulgent wallowing he thought he’d made himself outgrow back in college after his unsuccessful OD when he’d hid from his thoughts right into getting his stomach pumped for the least exciting reason imaginable, but given that he apparently has not actually grown or matured in any way since the tenth grade, who gives a shit. He spends an entire morning drinking beer and playing the third Los Campesinos! LP, remembering setting his Gchat status to _we are but two atheists in lust_ as some weird stab at the space between self-deprecating and aspirational. It came out the week he got out of the hospital the first time, although he’d been listening to almost nothing but the lead single for months by then, so that the album is associated with both his descent into dysfunction and the wavering optimism of the months after. The timing had felt like a sign, he remembers; like the universe was welcoming him back to the world by reminding him there were things out there he liked. Narcissistic little shithead.

It still taps into the places it tapped into then: his pretentious melancholy, his instinctive attraction to hyperverbal flights of despair. The grandiosity of resignation, an occasional eye-rolling affect that had made the record’s grimness feel very clever and adult when he was sixteen. He feels like there might be more self-awareness than he had known to look for as a kid who had always confused being self-conscious with being self-aware, but the music is too entwined with his memories for him to gauge how he really thinks of it now; the drums and guitars and occasional swelling strings are trig homework and heating up leftover chicken and potatoes when his dad was working late and waiting for Julia on the steps of the school because they had the same first-period English class that year and always walked in together. He had spent her birthday in the hospital and not even realized it till days later and felt like shit for not noticing and felt like shit for the slice of relief that cut through him knowing he’d missed having to go to the first actual birthday party she’d had in years with all the friends she’d made from cross-country and who knew where else.

He’s been texting Julia back, still; mostly one-word responses to pictures she sends him of her travels with Penny with an occasional exclamation point to gesture towards enthusiasm, but he can’t avoid her entirely. She has a hard limit on how much radio silence she’ll allow before demanding evidence of his continued survival, as he’s known since a very embarrassing visit from campus security over a weekend freshman year when she was visiting a friend at Amherst while he compulsively played Minesweeper to avoid his econ homework/life. He had felt terrible for worrying her and word-vomited apologies the next time he saw her, but she had forgiven him easily when she saw he was okay, or okay-ish. Like she had forgiven him for missing her birthday in tenth grade, like she had forgiven him two weeks ago for aiming all his carefully cultivated monstrosity straight at her heart. He doesn’t understand how she can keep sticking around. And it’s true, it’s still true and maybe the only undamning truth of his existence, that he’s not planning to test her on that, ever again, but his skin still crawls when he sits with the mix of how deeply he doesn’t deserve to be forgiven and how badly he wants it anyway.

Drunk enough to ignore why he shouldn’t, he takes out his phone and texts Alice: _Can you ever forgive me?_

She doesn’t respond right away; she’s probably busy, doing something impressive and worthwhile. It’s insane she ever wanted to give her time to him, and outrageous how ungratefully he received it. He doesn’t know what he wants from her, anyway; the right answer is obviously no. He closes his eyes, wondering if it’s been long enough since he was last unconscious that he can fall back asleep, listening to the record play out its wistful end: _the first time, the last time, all the times I would’ve liked there to have been…_ He would’ve wanted them to be so much beyond what they ever managed to each other. Even if they broke up anyway. He would’ve wanted to give her more good memories of him. An ending that didn’t cut open any old wounds.

His phone buzzes in his hand and automatically he sighs, steeling himself, and brings it to his ear, saying in what he hopes is a sober-sounding tone, “Hey, Jules, what’s up?”

But it’s Alice who says, “Fuck you, Quentin.”

“Oh.” He opens his eyes, resigned. He’s earned this, probably. More than probably. Maybe he texted her because she’s the one person he can trust not to be kinder than deserves.

“Seriously, fuck you,” she goes on. “You have to stop this, okay? You cannot just fucking text people shit like that in the middle of — I mean it’s like four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m fucking _busy_ , I’m researching and meeting with committees and, and planning and — just trying to live my fucking life, I have _things to do_ , my entire life does not revolve around my fucked up ex-boyfriend texting me whenever he gets too self-loathing to deal with it on his own, I can’t just — _stop_ , I can’t just be fucking derailed because you had a bad day, or — I mean, fuck you.”

“You’re right,” he says.

“And I —” Alice catches herself. “Wait, what?”

He can picture the little jerk backwards of her head, her brows pinching slightly in; it almost makes him smile. “You’re right. I keep just — using you as another thing to do to distract myself when I’m feeling extra fucked up, and it’s not right, or kind, and — you’re right. You don’t deserve that.”

“Well — yeah. I am.” Blinking behind her glasses, nodding briskly. “Thank you for acknowledging that. That’s very fair of you.”

“I’m trying,” he says. “To —” Not to do much, at the moment or maybe ever again. But — “To be… fair, I guess. Fairer than I have been.”

“Good,” she says. “I think that’s good.”

“Well, you of all people know it’s overdue.” Her face in the penthouse the day they broke up — what if that was the last time? His last memory of Alice, a final monument to his gift for shattering her heart.

“And _another_ thing,” Alice starts heatedly, then stops, like this was part of her speech but now she has to make some edits in light of his unexpected turn towards being a somewhat less repugnant human being. He really does like her so much, still, no matter how useless that is now. “I mean, Quentin, you texted me about forgiveness —”

“I know,” he says, cringing, “I really have no standing to —”

“Don’t interrupt me,” she says. “That’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say — I don’t think forgiveness is really what you should be thinking about right now.”

He raises an eyebrow automatically at the ceiling. “You don’t?”

“No, I think —” Long silence; Alice ordering her thoughts. “Do you remember what you said to me when we got back together?”

“Uh.” Quentin blanches. “How much of an asshole does it make me if I ask you to refresh my memory?”

“I mean — there was a lot going on.” Understatement. By that time it must have been weeks since he’d managed more than three consecutive hours of sleep. “You gave me this whole speech about, like, naiveté and childish expectations and forgiveness — which should have been a red flag, honestly, it was not exactly the big romantic gesture reunion in my imagination —”

“Since when are you a romantic,” he can’t help asking, feeling his mouth curl slightly upward in spite of himself.

“I’m _not_ ,” Alice says; the _you idiot_ is silent. “But _you_ fucking are. I should have known you weren’t… anyway.” Quentin’s throat tenses, a little; he thinks if that was ever true, it’s not anymore, and as much as logically it seems like a positive development, listening to her say it, it feels like a loss. “My point is — I’d spent so long feeling like I’d fucked everything up so much, and the only way I could ever be okay again is if I could somehow get you to forgive me. If I could earn your forgiveness like — like it was a paycheck, or degree. Like if I racked up the right number of good person credits, I could graduate to being forgiven. But when you forgave me, was it because I’d done enough good things? Because I _deserved_ it?”

“No,” he says; he doesn’t need to think about it.

“Why was it?”

“Because…” He tries to remember. Talking with her in the kitchen like nothing between them had ever broken, looking for the anger he’d been gripping so tightly and finding it just wasn’t there. Her long hair, her funny uncertain smile. “I don’t know why, I guess. Because — I loved you, and you fucked up, and one of those things had seemed way more important than the other, and then it didn’t. We’d been — working together, and talking, and suddenly all of — _that_ — mattered more than something you’d done in the past.” 

“Right,” Alice says. “It wasn’t really _about_ me. It never had been. Forgiveness is something that other people choose, or don’t choose, for their own reasons, and you can’t — you can’t control other people. I mean if there’s anything I’ve fucking learned, you know. You can’t control them, and you can’t spend all your time making yourself the person you think they want to see.”

“So what do you do,” he asks.

“You just live.” Quentin digs his teeth into his lip. “You just keep trying to be better than you were before, and figuring out what’s right, and seeing if you can learn from your fuck-ups, and… people might forgive you or not, but. Eventually you can go to sleep at night feeling like the person you meant to be. At least I hope so.” She gives a little laugh. “I’m not really there yet. But — it feels less impossible than it used to. Sometimes it’s like I almost am.”

“That’s good,” he says softly. What she’s describing sounds beyond impossible to him, like he’s some bottom-feeding invertebrate listening to a bird extol the virtues of flying. But she doesn’t need to hear about that. “I really am sorry, you know. For the texts, and especially for — how I ended things. You deserved better than that.”

“Wait, _that’s_ what you feel bad about?” Alice sounds incredulous. “Our break-up?”

“Uh... yes?” How is it that they’re like a hundred break-ups in and still their relationship feels like a final exam he is constantly failing? “Is that not — I mean, you seemed pretty upset about it at the time. And I thought — with the Eliot thing, plus I was — I was pretty much an asshole about it, so...”

“I mean, you didn’t handle it _well_ ,” Alice says. “But that’s not why I was — I mean, Q, I was lashing out too.”

Puzzled he asks, “You were? Why?”

“Because —” She makes a little _tch_ noise of frustration. “Because I felt _guilty_ , Quentin!”

“ _Guilty_?” The fuck? “About what?”

“I — because I’d wanted to break up with you for, god, _months_ by then, so when you finally did it, I felt like it was my fault, or like I’d — failed you, or something.”

“You — what?” He can barely process what she’s saying but he needs to respond to the most urgent part, which — “You didn’t… fail me, Vix.”

“No, I know that _now_ ,” she says. “But in the moment, it was — hard. Because I’d wanted this, and I hadn’t wanted it, and I felt sad, but also kind of relieved, and — it was hard.”

“Why…” Quentin hesitates; decides she can just hang up if she doesn’t want to tell him, asks, “Why had you wanted to break up with me for months?” 

Skeptical, bemused — “Do you really want to know?”

“I… kind of?” He had thought they were doing — not great, maybe, but — okay. Stable. Intact, up to the point he had split them. And if they weren’t — well, he’s even fucking dumber than he thought he was, but. If that’s the case, he feels like he should know. Clear out any lingering lies he’s been stupid enough to believe. “If you don’t mind. I’m — I don’t know, I’m supposed to be… getting my fucking life together, or whatever, and I’m not, like, confident about that proposition in general, but — probably it would be better not to start from, uh. Faulty premises.”

“Okay,” Alice says, slowly, like she’s taking in his reasoning. “Well. I wanted to break up with you because… because you were being awful, Quentin.” She says this like she tried really hard to find the absolute kindest way to put it, and after a long and thorough vetting process this was it. “Just — all the time. I mean you were drunk, like, _constantly_. Like, should-I-stage-an-intervention constantly, it was… concerning, and frankly annoying, I mean — _my boyfriend won’t fuck me sober_ is not exactly great for a person’s self-esteem. When I tried to talk to you about how you were doing, you told me I was overreacting and trying to control you, and when I tried to be normal you said I wasn’t being sensitive enough about the fact that you’d died. And I _was_ , I mean obviously I was trying to be fucking sensitive about your fucking death, Quentin, but I was also — trying to figure out my own life, and I kept having these visions of like, what if it never gets better? What if I’ve just linked myself for life to this person who won’t even, like, _try_ to — I wasn’t asking for you to go like, scale Kilimanjaro and learn to play the cello and get a PhD. I wanted you to do shit like, get through a ten-minute conversation without bailing or picking a fight. Text me _before_ cancelling instead of just no-showing on plans we’d made, that _you’d_ agreed to. I couldn’t ever win, and I couldn’t figure out how to help you, but what was I going to do? Break up with you after everything you’d done? Like what kind of bitch would I be if I dumped the guy that died saving the world? I — I mean, Q, is any of this ringing a bell?”

“Unfortunately,” he says, “yes.” He does remember; of course he remembers. Not super acutely, because, yeah, as soon as they’d let him out of the Brakebills infirmary he’d started drinking and basically hasn’t stopped since. But thinking now he remembers, sure, the drinking, and the hamster wheel of their fruitless conversations about it, and the constant simmering resentment he hadn’t bothered trying to hide of her love and her closeness and her life somehow spinning onwards, and the fights, and her careful soft tone saying to him over and over: _I’m really worried about you, Q. I want to help you and I don’t know how_. “I don’t… I’m sorry. I guess I hadn’t, uh — I guess I didn’t really let myself see what I was doing. Or didn’t want to, or —” He feels like he owes her an explanation, but he can’t explain. “Julia said this thing,” he says, remembering, “before — we had kind of a fight, or —” Letting himself off the hook again; he tries to reroute. “That’s not — more like I was kind of a dick to her, or, not _kind of_ , I mean —”

“That was kind of implied,” Alice says, not ungentle and a little bit wry.

“Yeah.” He inhales, picturing again her stricken face. “Anyway. She told me I was like, trying to make myself unforgivable, which… I don’t know. I don’t if — or why I would — I’m sorry.” Nothing seems good enough.

Alice is quiet for a moment. When she speaks it doesn’t seem at first like a response. “Do you remember what I asked you? That day we got back together?”

“About, uh…” He does remember: the hopeful uplift in her voice, _like yourself_? But he can’t make his mouth say it.

“I asked if you’d forgiven yourself,” she says. “You never answered me.”

“Right.” He doesn’t answer her now, either. “I mean. I’ve added a lot of things to the pile since then. Not that I have to tell you.”

“Yeah,” she says. “So?”

He chews at his lip. “I thought you said I shouldn’t be thinking about forgiveness right now.”

“Forgiveness from _other_ people,” Alice says. “Not yourself.”

“Isn’t that like, the least important kind?”

“Probably,” she says. “But it’s the only kind you can do anything about.”

So what do I do, he wants to say; what do I do, and how do I do it, and why do I bother. Explain it to me, Alice, please, how to live when every memory of something I’ve done feels like another step forward on burning coals. But she definitely doesn’t owe him that, so he just says, again, “I really am sorry, Alice. I know I keep saying that, but — I have a lot to apologize for.”

Alice doesn’t say _I forgive you_ , or _I don’t forgive you_. She says, “I know you are. And it — means something, that you said it. It does, Quentin. You should — I mean, don’t throw yourself a parade about it. But this counts too. You should know that.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. Even if it’s true, it’s so small compared to everything else. “I should let you get back to your research, and things. Thanks for — talking. I’ll leave you alone from now. I promise. I’ll delete your number, just to be sure. Okay?”

“Wait,” Alice says, “ _what_?”

“Well, you said —”

“That is _not_ what I —”

“I mean,” Quentin tries, bewildered and astonished that somehow he is failing even in this, “I’m clearly just — upsetting you, and that’s pretty fucking justified, so —”

“God, you’re so _dramatic_ ,” she huffs. “You always do this, Quentin. You always — take what’s happening around you and just fit it into some story that you made up in your head and then you act like it’s the objective truth. I _didn’t_ say, Quentin, delete my number and never talk to me again. And if that’s what I wanted, I would have fucking told you. What I said was, stop texting me weird despondent shit out of nowhere at all hours of the day. _You_ turned it into me needing you to — disappear, or whatever.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, confused. “So…”

“So,” Alice says, “if you want to talk to me like an actual person, who has a life outside of being Quentin Coldwater’s psychological baby blanket he pulls out whenever he’s upset, then — we can figure that out. And if you don’t, then — you don’t, and we won’t. But that’s _you_ , doing that. Don’t put it on me.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. He’s not sure he understands, but he doesn’t want to take up any more of her time. “Well. Thanks, again. And — good luck with everything. Not that you need it.”

“Everyone needs luck, Quentin,” she says. “Life is fucking hard. Take care of yourself, okay?”

“I’ll try,” he says. He thinks that saying that to her should be enough to mean it. Like he owes her that much, at least. But he doesn’t really think he will. He’s not sure he remembers how.

*

He’s staring into space listening to _Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?_ because it kind of feels like the past _is_ a grotesque animal, or his past is, and he’s definitely all unraveled, and maybe he wants to smash his kneecaps with a hammer to think that he and Eliot are always touching by underground wires but he wants to smash his kneecaps with a hammer anyway and there’s kind of a sick pleasure in picking deliberately at that particular ache, when Luisa pokes her head into his room.

Quentin startles, sits up faster than his head can really handle, yanks the earbuds out of his ears, finds his phone to pause. “Hey —”

“Sorry,” she says, “I knocked, but —”

“No, yeah, I was listening to music,” he says, “what’s up?” He does a mental inventory: he’s definitely wearing pants, recently _enough_ showered, probably not visibly inebriated, pretty sure he’s hid the empty bottles he’s been accumulating beneath his bed, which — whatever. He’ll worry about that in the future, if he ever manages to believe he has a future to worry in. “You can come in,” he says, 

“I was just checking in,” she says, shutting the door behind her and sitting on the chair by the desk. “Haven’t seen much of you for a couple days. Totally fine, but — I wanted to see how you were, given.” She shrugs amiably as if to say: _The many problems you have gestured to and apparently not done anything about._

“Yeah.” He’s embarrassed to be caught like this, but he can’t pretend he’s put much effort into hiding it. “I’m, you know.” He shrugs back, as if to say: _Yeah, those_. “Bad, but not like, emergency room bad, so.”

“Mmm.” She nods. “Anything I could do to help?”

“Probably not?” He gives a short laugh, in the face of its insurmountableness. She smiles but doesn’t say anything, like she’s giving him a chance to change his mind. “How do you fucking do it?”

She tilts her head to the side. “Which part?”

“All of it,” he says. “The life part, the — like I was trying to convince myself to get out of bed and it was just like, why? What’s going to be less awful outside of bed than it is here? And I know that I’m supposed to believe that maybe it won’t be less awful _now_ , but it will be some day, somehow, if I keep fucking — showing up, or whatever, but I — I don’t believe that. I was never good at believing that, and now it’s like, I look at every time I thought it was going to be worth it, or turn out okay, and I was an idiot to think that, every single time. So — how do you do that? When you really don’t think the thing you’re supposed to hope for is ever coming — how do you fucking hope?”

Luisa props her elbow on the edge of the desk to rest her chin in her hand. In the ensuing silence it occurs to Quentin that maybe he has asked her a very insane and unreasonable question, but she seems to be taking it seriously. “I don’t know if I think about it that way,” she says finally. “Which I guess isn’t super helpful, so — sorry.”

“It’s okay, I mean —” He shakes his head. “I wasn’t really asking for help.”

“It’s like, at my job, right?” Luisa says. “I don’t know how often you hang out with the climate people, but they are not a rose-colored bunch. Things are fucked and getting fucked-er. That’s not me being a downer. That’s just reality. I’ve lived in this state my whole life, and fire season has not always been like it is now, and you could think about that forever and never find a silver lining. But — working with people trying to find ways to make things even a little bit better than they might otherwise be — a few more people who survive, a few more days we don’t all spend choking on smoke — I don’t know. It doesn’t change much, but it — grounds me, I guess. Or gives me — perspective, maybe, but perspective like in a painting. Like what I’m doing is so small, compared to everything else, but it’s mine and it’s here so it looks bigger. Big enough to block out the view, sometimes. Sort of. Enough to get out of bed.”

Quentin nods. “That’s very wise.”

She grins. “But it’s not helpful.”

He manages a tired smile. How is he so tired when all he does is lie down? “Not even a little.”

“Yeah, that sounds right.” She nods, stands up. “Well. If there is anything, you know where I am.”

“Thank you,” he says, appreciating it even though he knows he won’t seek her out.

“I think Ray and Toni were talking about rewatching _Moonstruck_ tonight,” she says. “If you wanted to come down for that.”

“Maybe,” he says. But as soon as she’s gone he goes back to bed.

*

Quentin turns twenty-seven drinking a handle of vodka by himself on the beach under an overcast sky, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt because he didn’t pack for summer in Southern California and he can’t bring himself to care enough to buy new clothes, because Gareth Campesinos! said that the sea is a good place to think about the future and that’s as close to motivation as he has right now. He’s not listening to that album, though; he’s listening to fucking _Nevermind_.

He was never really into Amy Winehouse, but she died a week after he graduated high school and two weeks before his dad found the draft note he’d left on the counter, either out of carelessness or because subconsciously he hoped it would be found; he’s never been able to know for sure which, if he fucked up trying to die or managed that time to save his own life. He was just shy of eighteen, relieved to have finished the four-year ordeal of American adolescence but more terrified of the future the closer it drew, increasingly convinced that despite her professed excitement to be sharing a campus with him Julia would get to Columbia and finally figure out she had never needed him and didn’t want him and he would spend four years acclimating to his fate of being alone. His dad had watched some coverage of her death on the evening news with the kind of sincere sorrow that was one of the things Quentin remembered his father for most, _Such a shame — that poor girl_ , and something about the sobbing crowds had struck him enough that during one of his habitual insomniac internet rabbit holes he had taken a break from reading the murder section of Snopes.com and googling _reasons not to kill yourself_ to type in her name and see what came up: her interviews, her videos, her golden voice live, good enough when it was good that the rest of the music barely mattered. From there he’d developed a morbid fascination with the 27 club, reading through lovingly assembled lists of Jim Morrison quotes, watching the handful of grainy recordings he could find of Hendrix and Joplin, wondering with obscene seventeen-year-old myopia — if life had so rapidly destroyed people so brilliant and so adored, what hope could there possibly be for him? He listened to Courtney Love making Nirvana fans shout _asshole_ before she read the suicide note, calling it bullshit when she was done — _Don’t remember this, ‘cause this is a fucking lie!_ — _Just remember: this is all bullshit_ … Scrolling through the comments he would read constant variations on the theme of _murderous fucking cunt never deserved him_ , baffled by the ire, and wonder if he’d ever have anyone who would care enough to be that angry at him for dying. He wants to believe that sleepless kid chasing devastation is far behind him, but of all his past selves, his wretched teen spirit might be the one that feels closest. What the fuck did he do if not choose burning out over fading away? And what the fuck is he doing now if not inanely comparing himself to _Kurt fucking Cobain_? Sorry, Courtney; should have listened, way back when.

It’s raining. It occurs to him that that’s not the first time he’s noticed, like maybe it’s been raining for a while. He looks down at himself and his clothes are wet, if not quite soaked through; after a few false starts he manages to double-up the waterproof shield on his phone, just in case. He stands to head inside, but he doesn’t go back to the house. Instead he kicks his shoes off and drops the handle of vodka, emptier than he remembered it being, and walks in his socks unsteady on the dunes down the beach, towards the shore, the storm-gray water spitting under the rain. The hugeness of the bay, the unfathomable enormity of the ocean behind it, water wrapped around the globe, immense and uncaring like a synecdoche of life itself. He can’t place himself, thinking on that scale; the closest he can get is that he’s an atom, only powerful at it the moment of its breaking. _I’m so ugly, that’s okay — so are you, we broke our mirrors..._

It’s not so much that he plans to go into the water as that he gets to the edge and doesn’t stop walking; he’s expecting his jeans to weigh him down once the ankles are soaked through, but they don’t nearly as much as he would have thought, half-floating in the water’s diminished gravity. He wades in to his knees, to his waist; belatedly he notices that the water is cold under the thickly clouded sky. Further still, soft sand giving way beneath his feet, his stomach tensing at the contact and the temperature; when it’s up to his chest he pushes off his toes to kick himself horizontal, loosely pulling himself forward with his arms. He’s not a great swimmer but he took enough summer lessons at the local Y that he can get himself around, even with his clothes adding some drag; wasn’t he saying some time ago he should go for a swim? Maybe this is some subconscious Biblical motif from a childhood of half-assed Protestantism and most of a B. A. focusing on American lit: baptism, birthdays, rebirth. Maybe he’s looking for a sign, like somewhere in this increasingly deep expanse will be the words that prove he needs to keep going. Isn’t that what he’s been doing his whole life? Searching and seeking, fucking _questing_ , for some evidence of his own significance from something enormous and indifferent and cold. Or maybe — he manages to twist onto his back, close his eyes against the rain and move just enough to keep afloat — maybe he wants to feel it: his absolute smallness surrounded by something real. Maybe he wants to absorb that into his body like water through cotton. Like if he stays out here long enough he’ll finally fucking understand what the ocean is telling him: You don’t matter. You never did. Like maybe once he really believes that, he’ll stop fighting and be able to live.

The rain is falling harder now; his eyes squeeze tight involuntarily, drops stinging his face when they land. He’s being, as usual, fucking stupid and melodramatic; he should turn around. He opens his eyes to get his bearings and is startled to see he’s drifted out further than he thought. The beach looks alarmingly far away and even as he tells himself to stay calm he feels a judder of fear in his chest. He starts swimming back, slow to conserve his energy, but the waves are whipping wilder now with the current beneath and the wind above and he can’t manage a straight line. His heart is pounding with exertion and terror and he tries to tell himself he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s a fucking magician and there are spells — he knows some of them, spells for air bubbles and spells for warmth, all that kind of shit, basic protective magic, he — knows but he’s fucking drunk and he can’t remember, he can’t get his brain to work right, he starts casting an air spell and loses track of the tuts halfway through and he knows there’s some kind of gliding spell chanted in Sumerian but he can’t remember the words, he can’t —

A wave shoves into his face, sending saltwater into his nose and mouth; he tries to tread water long enough to cough his way back to breathing clear but another wave chokes him while his mouth is still open. He needs to — he doesn’t fucking know what. He needs to stay calm but he is fully panicking now, legs kicking faster than he can sustain very long and arms flailing wildly, like his body is a stampede and each part is only trying to escape with itself. His head slips below the broken mirror of the water’s surface and he manages to pull himself back up only a second before sinking back down, lungs burning, eyes stinging shut.

He can’t — he can’t. He’s moving blind and he wants to scream or cry but he can’t open his mouth and he can’t find air again and then suddenly he can’t move. Not at all — limbs frozen at desperate angles, face still, one strand of hair brushing against his cheek where he turned his head and can’t turn it back. He thinks for one absurd second of Houdini, upside down in chains; he died of appendicitis, Quentin remembers, after one last show.

Quentin didn’t think this was what drowning would be like. His body feels heavy, almost like he’s falling asleep. His lungs don’t hurt anymore. He can feel the water rushing past his skin as he slips down, down, like a concrete, or a stone. It’s getting warmer the further he goes, which it strikes him is strange; he would have expected the opposite. Distantly he remembers that he’s dying and that a few minutes ago that struck him as very sad. He can’t find that sadness anymore, though. He feels nearly relaxed. His pulse has dropped, is maybe still dropping, slower than slow. The water warms his feet and the backs of his eyelids glow red, like he’s approaching some light. He thinks he hears women’s voices, singing, a strange atonal chorus far away but getting closer. Lovely and deep. They sound like Amy Winehouse, he thinks, her brassy warble, alive and strong with its heartbreak hitch; they sound like Courtney Love.

*

He’s cold. Extremely cold. Like, literal Antarctic night cold, a cold past the pain of it and into an unearthly numbness, less a physical sensation and more an abstract sense that something is gravely wrong. He should be shivering but he’s not; in fact he can’t. He was drowning, he thinks; is this death? He doesn’t remember it from the first time. He can’t open his eyes.

Then something in him, or on him, or around him, starts to thaw, and he can feel it now, starting at his toes and moving up: cold beyond ice, cold so severe it burns, and his body starts convulsing with it, trying desperately to heat itself up. He’s breathing fast, he notices; he’s not sure he was breathing before. The air is warm around him so he tries to breathe deep again, again, bringing the warmth into his lungs.

It feels like a long time that he — lies there? Is he lying down? — seizing with the cold, but it also feels like a punishment out of Dante so maybe it’s only a few minutes. Eventually it subsides to a normal human level of horribly cold, teeth chattering and muscles shaking, arms instinctively wrapping around his chest, speeding friction along his biceps. He’s naked, he realizes; he opens his eyes.

He is lying down; with the world in his sight, he can recognize that he’s lying atop an uneven surface — sand. He’s at the beach. He’s not thinking about the sand, though. He’s thinking about the seal who is staring down at him with huge black eyes right above his face.

“Uh,” he tries. His voice is hoarse, but usable. He doesn’t know shit about seals. They’re carnivores, right? Probably they don’t hunt humans regularly, but — he’s easy prey, no doubt. They might not be picky. Is he supposed to play dead? Shout and run away? Or has he lucked out and the seal is magic, somehow, and — _not_ going to eat him? That wouldn’t be the weirdest thing he’s met. “Hello?”

The seal backs up and claps its flippers together.

“So that seems like a vote for not eating me,” Quentin says. He moves to sit up. It’s not fun. Everything hurts. “Cool. Do you —”

But he doesn’t get to finish his question because the seal starts moving its neck wildly up and down with a kind of violent hacking motion like cats do when they’re coughing up a hairball and then —

“ _Oh_ holy motherfuckingSHITfuck JESUS godfucking _Christ_ —”

— the seal, like, _vomits up a woman_ , like it’s hacking and it’s bobbing and out of its unhinged jaw reach a pair of hands, followed by arms, followed by her goddamn _head_ in a swirl of inexplicably dry red curls, until she’s stepping out of the deflated sealskin like a skirt, standing above Quentin with a pleased smile. “Little one! You’re awake.”

“I… sure,” Quentin says. He’s not a thousand percent convinced, after what she just saw. The woman stoops down to gather up the skin delicately and suddenly he remembers — “You’re a selkie.”

Her smile widens. She has very sharp teeth. “Sure.”

A selkie with a sense of humor. That’s — fine, probably. Quentin is trying to remember what he’s read about selkies — ships, human men, skins, traps, marriages, love of the sea, seven years? Something like that. Nothing about eating people, which is good. “What — uh, how did I — where did you —”

The selkie sits beside him on the sand. She’s naked, too, and very beautiful, in kind of a James Cameron uncanny valley sort of way: legs impossibly long, waist impossibly small, breasts impossibly firm, eyes just a little larger than seems healthy, with pupils almost to the edge of the emerald green irises. Her skin is pale, with an eerie blue shadow that seems to vanish whenever he tries to look directly at it.

“First, drink this,” she says, offering him a bowl that looks to be carved from bone — where the hell did that come from? — brimming with a milky liquid.

He takes it, not wanting to be rude, but also trying once again to recall any selkie lore about, like, poisoning humans. “What is it?”

The selkie answers in her lilting speech, “The milk of my sisters who are nursing their young.”

Quentin tries _extremely_ hard not to react to that. “Oh, that’s — that’s very nice of you, really, but I’m not —”

She shakes her head, suddenly agitated. “No, little one. You must drink. You were caught in the storm, likely to drown, and my sisters and I saved you. We spun for you a net of our magic, to keep you safe and bring you to shore. But our magic is for subduing creatures of the deep, not for rescuing men of the land. Your body and your magic will be feeling the effects for weeks if you don’t drink. You could become gravely ill.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. That’s — objectively, he reasons, that is less pleasant than drinking, uh. Selkie-milk. “Okay. Well, in that case —” He lifts the bowl to his lips and braces himself, but in fact it tastes almost exactly like chamomile tea. And as soon as he swallows he can feel the cold start to ebb to more tolerable levels. “Thank you. For this and for — saving me.”

Smiling again, she says, “It was my pleasure, little one.”

“Okay, I’m not _little_ ,” he can’t help protesting defensively, lifting his knees up to cover his dick and hunching over. He’s not — he’s _so_ cold, okay, it’s not a fair showing.

The selkie trills a laugh. “No? And how many years have you walked the earth?”

“I’m twenty-six,” Quentin says automatically, then remembers. “Twenty-seven, actually, today.”

“Psh!” She waves the number off. “Barely an orbit of Saturn! You are young. Even for a human you are young.” She scans him up and down, noting his posture. “Excuse me! I had forgotten about human bashfulness.” She picks up the sealskin — _her skin_ that she just _took off_ — from her lap and holds it out to you. “This will cover you nicely while your garments dry under my magic.”

“Uh,” Quentin says, but he doesn’t really have time to unpack any of that before she drapes it under his shoulders. It’s — very soft, he must admit. And warm. “Thanks.” He drinks more of the milk.

She nods, apparently satisfied. “You live in the house of magic past the edge of our terrain, yes?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Or — I do now, I guess. I just moved in.” Remembering what Luisa told him about their boundary, he rushes to apologize. “I’m really sorry for uh — crossing into your territory like that. I didn’t mean — I was kind of out of it —”

“Fear not, little magician,” the selkie says reassuringly. “No offense has been taken.” She leans in with a kind smile. “It was plain as day to anybody looking at you for even the briefest moment from afar that you had simply no idea what you were doing.”

Quentin nods, somehow both relieved and resigned. “Cool,” he says. “That was — yeah, I’m glad we’re all… clear on that.” He finishes the milk and gives her back the bowl and looks around, now that his wits have returned to him; he doesn’t know if it was the near-drowning or the time spent unconscious or the selkies’ magic, but he’s pretty sure he’s sobered up, too. They’re on the beach; it’s still raining, and hard, but not on them, which must be her doing, somehow. He can see his clothes past his feet glowing a little, damp but not soaked through. “Are you — can people see us?”

He turns back to her to listen to her answer; the bowl is gone, what the fuck. She shakes her head. “No, I’ve placed a wall of vision. What human magicians call a ward. Against the rain, as well. We can stay here unseen until the sky clears.”

“Awesome,” Quentin says. “That’s — really generous of you.” He tries to think of something they could talk about that would be appropriate small talk for a magical creature that’s just saved your life. “So — wait, I thought selkies were Scottish,” he says. “What are you guys doing down in California?”

“Yes,” she says, and her serene smile takes a wistful look. “We hail from the Scottish Isles, and those were the waters that formed our ancestral home, as far back as any clan’s memory can trace. But it had become sport among darker practitioners to poach us for our skins and our teeth and our hair, and Scottish law is even more brutish than that of the Americans regarding the protection of those such as ourselves. We have power, deep power; but they had weapons, and tenacity. And unlike us, they cared not one bit if they destroyed our home. So the clans began to leave. I do not know whether any remain.”

“Wow,” Quentin says. “That sucks. I’m sorry.”

The selkie shrugs. “It was terrible, leaving. The isles were all we had ever known. But we were being hunted. We had to change, or else perish. And the world after all is very large, little magician. Much larger than we knew. All oceans are the same ocean. There were many places we could go. We spent a solar orbit simply swimming, and what things we saw! All manner of ways of living among beings that know their own names. And now we like this new shore of California. The weather is beautiful, and the people who find us approach with friendship in their hearts.”

Somewhere in his brain Quentin is wondering about, like, don’t cold-weather mammals die in the heat or get super depressed like that polar bear at Central Park, like didn’t they evolve for specific conditions or something — but, well. Magic. “Oh. I’m glad.”

“Yes,” says the selkie. “I am, as well.”

Quentin looks out at the bay, which is the ocean, which is all oceans. The largeness of the world, his own self a speck on its shore. A grain of fucking sand.

“Human,” says the selkie conversationally, “would you like to engage in sexual congress?”

Quentin stares at her, wondering if he is hallucinating. “Uh… like, with you?”

She laughs her odd warbling laugh. “Who else!”

“Oh,” Quentin says. “I — is that a good idea, or…”

“I am told it is quite invigorating for your kind,” she says.

“Right,” Quentin says, nodding. He’s not sure if she means humans or men.

The selkie leans in conspiratorially. “It has been some time since I took a consort.” She covers her mouth with her hand mischievously, like this is some fun secret.

“Oh,” he says again. “Well, I mean — if you really want to —” This is insane, he thinks calmly; but also, fuck it. It’s his birthday, and he almost drowned. Plus, he’s sober. By accident, sure, but he figures that’s gotta be worth, like. Half-credit. “Yeah, okay.”

The selkie grins an unsettlingly ravenous grin. “Delightful,” she proclaims, and then she pounces.

The sex is —

— okay, so it’s like —

— it feels almost —

— it is completely fucking impossible to describe, because it consists almost exclusively of sensations that human bodies — and not just human bodies, Quentin thinks wildly while she does _something_ to his nipple that is somehow traveling all the way down his spine, like human shades and meridians and every other extraphysical piece — were not designed to experience. She kisses him by sucking at his tongue like she’s trying to rip it out of his mouth, and it does not bear much resemblance to any kiss he has had in his life, but also, his entire body immediately turns wildly on. Every time she touches him he feels like his skin is on fire and also like he wants to jerk off. At one point she bites his dick, _hard_ , with all those little sharp teeth, but it doesn’t hurt? It feels very much like an orgasm but he doesn’t come? He feels like he is on LSD, maybe, or in a scene out of porn directed by David Lynch. She gets on top of him and rides him and rides him and at one point he could swear she also starts fucking him in the ass but _with what_ , he has _no clue_. He makes an absurd series of noises ranging from throaty groans to high-pitched laughter to shouts that sound to his own ear frightened but which actually come from startling arousal along his, like, calves? While she’s up there with her weird _Avatar_ boobs that don’t bounce and her curly hair that very much does she pants in her deep husky register, and then she starts to fucking _sing_ , and — she really does sound kind of like Courtney Love. Like a Scottish Courtney Love singing an Enya song. He feels like he is exactly on the precipice of getting off but no matter how she fucks him he just stays there, every cell in his body at some hormonal peak, basically screaming because his brain was not built to process this level of stimulus, until she finishes the song, at which point he comes like a punch to the gut and keeps coming for like three minutes straight while she watches him twitch and shake and moan and smiles affectionately.

She lifts herself off him and sits back at his side. “Did you enjoy that, little magician?”

Quentin manages somehow to push himself to sit back up, despite the fact that he came so hard his fucking hands are cramping and there’s a weird tingling around his mouth like he just got injected with Novocaine. “I — yeah. Yeah I did. I — invigorating is, uh. That’s a good word. For that.” He looks at her, feeling sexually pretty useless by comparison. “Did you, uh — I mean, do you want —” His brain shorts out trying to find the polite way to ask _Do selkies have g-spots? Do you want me to do something to whatever the hell you have going on down there?_

“I have had exactly what I wanted to have,” she says with a cheeky little wink which feels very odd to see on someone who has brought new literalness to his conception of the phrase _fucked his brains out_.

“Cool,” he says. “Good. I wouldn’t want to, you know…” What the fuck is he saying? He lifts his hands in front of him, trying to stretch out his aching fingers.

The selkie frowns at him, concerned. “Are you certain our engagement was enjoyable? You seem disconcerted.”

“No, yeah, it was — great, really, it just — wasn’t exactly what I would normally call sex?” he tries. “But — great, so great. Just, uh — in the stories you guys are a lot more like humans, about most things.”

“Oh, sure,” she says. “And in the stories we can be trapped by the theft of our skin, and in the stories we have little magic of our own, and in the stories we all live in Scotland. Stories make us small, magician. The world is much larger than what you’ll find there.”

“Well,” Quentin says, “you _did_ all live in Scotland, you said. So — that part was true.”

“It was,” she says. “And now it’s not. Because we wanted to survive, and so we did.” She looks around. “Oh! The rain has stopped. And your garments should be dry by now.” She hops up to fetch them and hands them over.

“Thanks,” he says. “I should give you back your — yours.” He passes her the sealskin, discarded by his side when they fucked, and she starts to fucking — step back into it, _what_? “Wait,” he says, feeling suddenly like a dick, and she stops. “Before you go — do you have a name?”

She grins at him. Her pointy teeth catch in the sunlight returning from behind the clouds. “Edine,” she says.

“I’m Quentin,” he offers. “Thanks again for saving my life. And it was — nice to meet you.”

“A most congenial acquaintance,” says Edine. “We venture only rarely to the shallows, but — perhaps you and I shall meet again under the rain.” And then she’s — shimmying herself into her skin like a log going into a woodchipper, and then she’s a seal, making her ungainly way back below the waves.

Quentin — has no idea how to begin to process what the fuck just happened. He dresses quickly, not sure whether the ward she set up outlasted her exit, and hurries back to the house to shower all the sand out of his ass crack. It takes forever.

*

He’s taking advantage of the unexpected early and unmiserable waking brought on by having collapsed into bed immediately after his shower yesterday from either shock or some lingering effects of selkie magic to scoop the bottles under his bed into his messenger bag and take them out to the recycling bin on the curb without being seen when it really hits him. Quentin overturns his bag and listens to the clatter of glass on glass falling into the blue bin and surveys the detritus of his wasted days, the evidence he’s been hiding because he knows it tells a story he doesn’t want to believe is his, and suddenly he can’t keep the pieces from coming together any longer: yesterday he got drunk and did something so stupid it could have killed him, and it’s pure dumb luck he survived.

And like — he knew, of course he knew, he’s known for a long time now that he’s been drinking nearly enough to qualify as a slow-motion suicide. Something in him has known that it’s one of the things he’s been shoving between himself and his own capacity to think about his life because he’s still fucking running from having to live with how badly he’s fucked it up; somewhere he’s understood that he’s kept doing that even as it’s worked less and less, as the headaches and the nausea and the half-numb misery have increasingly outweighed any moments of real forgetting. He knows what it’s called, when you don’t want to do something anymore but you can’t stop. And even if just the thought of the word burns too humiliatingly around his ears to taste the name in his own mouth, he knows what it means. He knows that if things stay the same, the danger won’t fade and one day he won’t get lucky. He knew and standing there at the recycling bin on Riviera Drive in the bright morning light of a cloudless sky he can’t pretend to not know any longer: if he doesn’t change, he’ll die.

It’s not any more complicated than that. It’s definitely not any lovelier or more inspiring. God knows he doesn’t want to face his days unfiltered; he thinks he might actually prefer death. But he’ll die for sure if he doesn’t try, so — so apparently he has to try. He has to — cut back, or stop, for a while at least, or — he can’t quite bring himself to believe he’s become a person who needs to — _quit drinking_ , the way people mean it when they say it like that, like — how they say it, but. He needs to do something that’s not what he’s been doing.

And as much as he’s dreading the impending dam-break of reality flooding his consciousness, as lousy as his track record is and as impossible as it feels still to hope, in that moment on the sidewalk on Riviera, Quentin thinks he might actually do this. Because if there’s something other than despair to be found in the memory of his terrified thrashing as he slipped inexorably beneath the waves, it’s that now he has proof: he didn’t come to California to die.

It’s a fucking start.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter comes with additional warnings about non-graphic **violence** and **substance abuse** ; see end notes for details.

Quentin’s new dedicatedly sober-ish lifestyle lasts somewhere between sixteen hours (measured strictly) and fifty-six (being more generous than he probably ought to be).

The daytime is — _fine_ is a stretch, but. He has a map, sort of, for what a day in his present life can look like that isn’t lying down watching the room spin, and he has a primary goal (don’t die) and a secondary goal (don’t get so wasted you forget goal #1), and between that and the freshly visceral memory that actually when you haven’t tricked yourself into believing it’s for some noble cause dying kind of sucks ass, it’s enough to propel himself back into the stream of ordinary activity. He makes toast and he helps Toni with the crossword (Penelope’s trick, six letters — _shroud_ ) and he drinks probably too much coffee but it’s enough to have a slightly manic conversation about restaurants of northern Jersey with Rishi the hauntologist who turns out to hail from Tenafly and he keeps running to his room to smoke because no one has said anything but he’s wary of causing a particularly Californian offense and he’s not the poster child for mental fucking health, _obviously_ , but — he’s not drowning himself, either. Literally _or_ metaphorically, he’s pretty sure. So that’s — a success, more or less.

It’s the night that really fucks him. Without quite admitting what he’s doing he puts off going to bed as long as he can, watching some anime movie from the eighties with Nico, the house’s resident night owl, but when the credits roll and Nico shuts off the TV, Quentin is out of excuses and on his own.

Which — it’s fucking sleep. The most basic bodily need, the simplest of all physical functions, the one necessity it takes effort _not_ to do. Lying in bed with his eyes closed shouldn’t feel like gearing up for fucking battle. And yet —

— his every limb is tense and his jaw is clenched and his eyelids won’t relax because he can hear the silence between the dim cresting of the distant wives fill itself with a voice clear as the abyss key’s dark apparition, an echo from a life where he believed he had been chosen, and it’s reminding him of the humiliation of that desire, and it’s listing again all the things it listed then, all the ways he used and abandoned the people his useless heart claimed to love, the fact that there had been a person who had stuck around long enough to see the truest parts of him and had when given the option to do it again said _lol no thanks_ , and it’s whispering now that he could have learned from that but he didn’t, he could have avoided his old mistakes but he didn’t, he could have overcome the weakness that got someone else killed but he didn’t and it’s only luck that no one else has been sacrificed in the name of his limp instinct for survival, he could have taken the inexplicable second chance of Eliot wanting him softened undoubtedly by his temporary loss but he didn’t, he didn’t, he crushed it beneath his heel and now he’ll never —

Quentin rolls onto his side to grab his headphones and put on the one OK Go album he ever really bothered with, something loud and fast and kinda dumb like a sonic night light against the noise of the industrial angst factory he calls a brain, figuring he has a better chance of falling asleep with the sound than without it. But even through the bright guitars snakes the voice hissing dark promises he can’t refute —

— _it’s the same, it always was, you will always be the same, how could you believe you could become anything else and how can you ever trust yourself again_ —

— and pressing down on him like water in his lungs is the moment of his death and his sick gratitude and the taunt that nothing will ever be better than that glimpse of annihilation and —

It’s well past midnight and he’s shaking with exhaustion by the time he gives up and tiptoes out of the house to get something that he knows by now won’t shut the truth out but will dim it enough for his nervous system to slip into unconsciousness, thinking _I want to fucking die_ and _shut up shut up shut up_ and _I tried, I did, I really did try_.

*

So that was Day One, Quentin thinks, waking the next morning coated in self-loathing more potent than his hangover. A failure, technically, but — maybe, he considers in muted desperation, maybe only partially? It’s not like — it’s not like he _wanted_ to get _drunk_ , he just — was trying to sleep. Needed to sleep. People can die without sleep, actually. It's happened. Maybe he can begin there: Plan B, new rule, only drink to fall asleep. Or for other, like, medicinal purposes. Which, yes, sounds like he is his own nineteenth-century quack doctor, but at least he’s not prescribing himself cocaine. Bit by bit, right?

Plan B goes smoothly on Day Two, and on Day Three, and on Day Four he wakes up only barely feeling like shit and musters up the energy to call Julia currently crossing Montana, _and_ he even remembers to ask her to tell Penny he said hey, and _then_ he spends like thirty entire minutes walking along the beach in the goddamn sunshine like a person who belongs there. Which is great, until he sees a couple holding hands by the surf, and like it’s been fucking waiting to ambush him his head says _Friendly reminder, you are going to die alone and it’s your own stupid fault on every conceivable level because you have insisted on squandering the improbable opportunities you have received in spite of your face and body and entire personality and broken capacity for love, and squandering them just to be clear in needlessly dickish ways_ , and it’s like he doesn’t even know where he’s going until he’s back in his room half a bottle of wine deep, OK fucking Go in his ears because he doesn’t have the energy to think beyond _here it goes, here it goes, here it goes again_.

*

Day Five, teeth gritted: This cannot be that hard. It cannot be that hard to — to, to what? To make it to sundown sober? Quentin can feel his ears burning with embarrassment even defining it in those terms because — because he shouldn’t need to define it in those terms, because it’s not that fucking hard, because he has done this, literally, thousands of times in his life, and if he can’t, that’s — it doesn’t matter, because he can. Of course he fucking can. He’s not — he can do this.

He makes it to 2:37 p.m.

*

Day Six, 1:12 p.m.

*

Day Seven, 5:49 p.m., but he got up at four, so he doesn’t think it counts.

*

Day Eight, he wakes up just past noon and stays in bed longer than that. If he never leaves his bed, Quentin reasons, he can’t do anything stupid. This plan lacks longevity, he recognizes, but is otherwise foolproof. The airtight logic offers a peculiar comfort.

Freed from the burden of having to try, Quentin considers the facts before him. He has spent a week trying to not-drink to varying degrees and then grossly failing to do so. This is because, he knows, he does not actually want to not-drink. In fact he wants to be drunk right now, very badly, and for the rest of the day, and tomorrow as well. And like — would that really be _so_ bad? On the one hand, he did almost drown himself, which would have been an even more embarrassing way to die than he’d managed the first time around. But on other hand: he’s an idiot. He _totally_ could have done that sober. And plenty of very successful people have gone through life avoiding sobriety. Faulkner, for one. Poe. Hemingway — not a great example. But Dorothy Parker lived to seventy-three. That feels _wildly_ optimistic for him. Not just writers, either. Grant won the Civil War drunk. Orson Welles made _Citizen Kane_. Mayakovsky —

— well, fuck.

As much as he would have preferred to be motivated by something like “hope” or “determination” or “the will to live,” it’s spite that finally pushes him to admit defeat, unlock his phone, and scroll through his contacts till he gets to the name he needs. His life may be a Florida swamp of indignities and vices, but he refuses to be as bad as that fucking guy. Low bar, but it’s what he’s got.

Kady answers the phone with, “Are you dying?”

“Uh,” Quentin says, caught off guard. He’d been half-hoping for, half-expecting her voice mail. “Do you mean, like, imminently?”

“I’ll take that as a no. What do you want?”

She sounds — the way Kady pretty much always sounds, talking to him: annoyed by default, but resigned now that she’s committed to the interaction. “Uh,” Quentin repeats, wishing he had planned this beyond the moment of the call. “So I’m trying — or, I’ve been trying — I feel like I should — I mean, I’m not an alcoholic.”

“Me neither,” says Kady. “Wow, we have so much in common.”

“Okay but —” Quentin pauses, considers. “I mean I don’t _think_ I’m an alcoholic.”

“You know who’s prone to saying that, like, kind of famously, right?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I know, but — I mean if you’re looking at like, just by quantity and frequency, or whatever, you know, if I were a, a frat boy in his senior year, no one would look twice at me, and lots of those guys graduate and go on to be totally normal about —”

“Why are you calling me, Quentin.”

“Because —” Quentin bites his lip. He doesn’t want to say it; he doesn’t want to say it the obvious way and he doesn’t want to have to find a way to say it he can stand, a necessity which brings its own humiliation. But he doesn’t want to be Mayakovsky either, and his alternatives are looking slim. “So I’m trying to like, fix my life, or whatever, and if someone were to do like, an audit of the things that are wrong with my life at this moment, like make a list of things, um, probably the amount I’m drinking would be… on the list. And it’s, um. I guess I kind of thought, once I had — admitted that to myself, or whatever, it would be easy enough to change, but it’s… it’s been harder. Than I thought.” His throat is tight, suddenly. Like forcing the words out took up too much room inside him. He’s glad she can’t see his face.

Kady says, “And this concerns me because…”

“You… “ He squeezes his eyes shut, as though it’ll be easier in the dark. “You know about quitting things, I guess. And I… maybe… need to… learn some things about that.”

“So you’re calling me because I’m the only heroin addict you know?”

“I —” Quentin cringes. “When you say it like that, it sounds kind of bad.”

“It does,” Kady agrees. “But you can relax. I’m mostly fucking with you.”

Quentin — does relax, actually. He wasn’t sure she’d even pick up. He doesn’t know why she did, if it’s a kind of transitive property of loyalty because he’s Julia’s friend or some solidarity among — people who have maybe needed to quit things — but either way he’s glad.

“I just, um…” He swallows. “I just don’t know what to, like, do. Like I know what I’m supposed to — _not_ do, but I don’t know how to do that — not-doing. Or — it’s so fucking stupid, because it’s not like I’m —” He almost says _It’s not like I’m Eliot_ , then hates himself for thinking it. “I mean I wasn’t always… I don’t remember how I used to just —”

“It’s like there’s this other you,” Kady says, just barely softened, “who knew the secret, right? The cheat code that made it all worth how shitty it feels, to live life without it, and at some point along the line he died and took it with him, and you can’t for the life of you figure out what it was. Something like that?”

Fuck. “Yeah. That’s — that’s pretty spot on, actually.”

“Okay,” Kady says. “Well. It’s definitely not for everyone, and most of the ones in the city I wouldn’t touch if you offered me Zelda Schiff’s head on a platter, but I do go to meetings. Or — I did, for a while, and I probably will again, the times it gets bad.”

“Meetings, like — like AA?” His cheeks burn with embarrassment at the phrase. “But I’m not — I mean I know how it sounds but I really don’t think I’m — like it’s been a couple of months like this, and I mean I did like, die, and anyway isn’t there some kind of gray area? Between people who have this like chronic _thing_ and people who, like maybe situationally in the short-term develop a kind of, like, problematic relationship to — or, like, I think I read this _Atlantic_ article once, about, um, reframing our cultural —”

“Did you call me because you want to drink less and you don’t know how,” Kady says, “or not.”

“Yes, but —”

“Then find an open meeting and give it a try. They don’t do, like, background checks at the door. They’re for anyone who thinks they might — _might_ — help. No one’s gonna kick you out for not being enough of an alcoholic.”

Quentin takes this in. “And — and you think they might help?” He should feel hopeful, at the possibility that anything might help him at this point; but his stomach sinks to think he might be fucked up enough that she’ll say yes.

“Anything’s possible,” Kady says. “But, yeah — I mean the twelve steps shit, some people swear by it but I can take or leave, but setting that aside — I think it might help to listen to some people who’ve thought about what you’re thinking about. It might help to talk to some of those people. It will almost _definitely_ help to have a reason to wash your hair and get out of the fucking house.”

“I’ve been washing my hair,” Quentin protests.

Kady just laughs, probably because she knows he is lying. “Go to a meeting. Go to five meetings in five days. Maybe you’ll find one that sticks. Or maybe you’ll hate them all, but it’ll give you something to do for the rest of the week, and in the meantime you can come up with a better idea.”

“Okay, well —” Quentin huffs, trying to tamp down the dread rising because like, when he said he didn’t know what to _do_ that didn’t mean he actually wanted to _do something_ , only now it seems like maybe that is in fact what that means. “I mean I don’t even know how I would find one, like — what, I just google _AA meetings San Diego_ , or —”

“That’s literally exactly what you do, yes.”

“Oh.” That’s… disappointing. “For some reason I thought it was going to be…”

“Harder?” Kady offers. “More complicated? So impossibly difficult that it wasn’t even worth trying?” Her tone is wry, but there’s a deep knowingness to it, too.

Quentin blinks. “I, uh — wow —”

“Yeah.” She gives a gruff laugh. “If I ever start acting like some fucking recovery guru, you are invited to take me out back and shoot me. But that’s one pro-tip I can give you now: it’s always exactly that easy, and it’s always that fucking hard.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. He doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Start tonight,” Kady says. “Don’t wait, it’s not a fucking marriage contract. Five meetings, five days, reevaluate from there. And —” She hesitates, but only for a moment. “You can plan to text me, after. Or — you can call me if you need to talk this shit out, it’s fine. But I meant — you don’t have to say anything about it, but if it helps, to have some accountability — I can be the person waiting on that text.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. “Yeah, uh — yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Thanks,” he adds, flashing back briefly to Penny in the hotel in Los Angeles, rolling his eyes at Quentin’s myopia. Kady’s offering him a kindness way beyond what he’s owed, and — he is grateful, he realizes, even if he isn’t looking forward to taking her advice. Like, deeply so. Maybe he’s been more afraid than he knew. “For — that, and — picking up the phone, and — you know. Not hanging up, I guess.” He considers asking her not to tell Julia about this, but — whatever. Her judgment on that matter is probably sounder than his.

He doesn’t thank her for this, but he’s grateful too for how she responds: “Clock’s ticking. Get your ass to Google.”

*

He finds a meeting starting in three hours at a coffeeshop in University City and decides (in the shower, washing his hair) to fill the time by walking the six miles there. He turns up _Kid A_ and for the duration of the album, sinking into a sound as anxious and unmoored as he feels which almost lets him feel like the call is coming from outside the brain-house, this feels like a brilliant move. Then the last eerie ambient ringing fades out and suddenly he’s been walking inland for fifty minutes in July in Southern California away from the protective cool of the ocean breeze, in a city that turns out to be _way_ hillier than suggested by the handful of blocks near the beach he’s been getting to know, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and wondering if it is physically possible to literally disintegrate into a puddle of his own sweat. Halfway through he calls it quits and gets an Uber, thinking as he waits that he might need to invest in shorts, if he is to go places in the future without looking like he fell in a particularly disgusting pool along the way. He doesn’t love that idea, but he appreciates having it. Like this plan is already reaping rewards, by adding something to his to-do list more concrete than _stay alive_.

The meeting at first glance looks different than he expected, mostly by virtue of not being in a church basement; the crowd skews a little younger than he would have thought, with a few people around his age and two or three noticeably younger, but there’s still a solid middle-aged contingent. One of the younger — members? visitors? alcoholics? What is Quentin, now that he’s here? — a girl with short, choppy pink hair looks about as uncomfortable as he is, skinny limbs drawn inward while her hands clutch a white paper cup, but the general vibe is friendly in the minutes before the official start time. People chat comfortably with each other as they settle in and find seats; a woman with a beaded glasses chain asks Quentin if it’s his first time and he doesn’t know if she means here or anywhere but since either is true he nods a yes and her warm smile broadens to welcome him, pouring him coffee and offering him the chair next to hers around the circle and leaving him be once he’s sitting.

A man older than Quentin, but not by that much, handsome and dark-haired with the slightest hint of salt-and-pepper at his temples, reads the twelve fucking steps, which feels kind of culty; he gives an encouraging nod towards someone and the girl with the pink hair, to Quentin’s surprise, stands up with an eye-rolling little wave through the _Hi, I’m an alcoholic_ dance, and then says, voice shaking, that she’s been coming for six months but this is her first time speaking. She cries, telling the group about leaving her abusive ex and losing her alleged friends and quitting all in one go, feeling like she had nothing left and knowing that would have been true if not for the people in this room; in their chairs the other members watch appreciatively, some misty-eyed, many nodding with understanding. “The night I moved out,” she says, eyes on the floor, “half of me thought I was going crazy, and half of me thought, this is the only way I’m going to save my own life. And, um —” She looks up, wipes her eyes; gives a short startled laugh. “I’m glad I listened to that second one. Because I’ve wanted to give up, so many times, but — it turns out my life might be worth saving after all, you know?” Murmurs of assent; they do know. Once she sits back down, the man chairing the meeting gives her an affectionate clasp on the shoulder before opening the floor to others who want to share, stories of hardship and survival less raw but no less bold: a guy in his sixties talks about sitting through his wife’s chemo treatments without a drink; the woman with the glasses chain offers reflections on sobriety in year five.

Quentin — hates this. Like _hates_ it, really hates it, like would maybe prefer being flayed alive or run over by a truck on a bed of lava. He hates the friendliness and the warmth and the public crying, the skin-crawling earnestness and the paper coffee cups and the goddamn empathy. He doesn’t want to be understood by these people; he doesn’t want contemplation or connection or fucking _hope_. He feels like a voyeur, glimpsing all this unearned intimacy from behind some stone-hard partition dividing him from a world he can’t touch, and the awareness that it’s his own festering misery grown thick within him that’s blocking him off only makes it seem more immovable. He makes himself stay to the end, so he can text Kady, as promised, a simple _I went_ ; outside, in the summer evening still bright and warm, he gives himself ten seconds to feel like he accomplished something before taking out his phone to locate the nearest cheap bar, hearing still in his head like a ghostly wailing or some malfunctioning science-fiction recording _I’m not here, this isn’t happening, I’m not here_.

*

That’s how the rest of the week goes, more or less. The meetings are smaller or larger, older or younger, god-heavier or determinedly secular, rigidly formal or gently structured, full of local witches or magic-free, but the process is the same: waking up in the afternoon to marinate in the hangover and the sore calves from walking a distance equivalent to a college day’s commute between classes and the self-loathing; dragging himself to a meeting as far as he thinks he can go without collapsing of heat stroke/melodrama; listening to looping strains of guitar and keyboard that sound like they remember having been songs, once; hailing a ride service after he finds he has once again overestimated his own physical and/or psychological stamina; stewing over a cup of weak coffee about how fucking nice it is for some people that after they blew up their lives they found a reason to pull them back together, all these stories that end in _I didn’t give up_ ; texting Kady; getting trashed. Worse than before, actually — way beyond any semblance of taking the edge off, drinking like he’s trying to give himself a chemical lobotomy. More than once he doesn’t remember quite how he made it home. _This isn’t happening — I’m not here..._

It doesn’t feel desperate, the drinking; it feels like a choice he can’t stop making, which is maybe an oxymoron, but — it feels deliberate, almost calculated. Certainly not hard to psychoanalyze. He sits in a meeting feeling like some glowering alien species physiologically incapable of experiencing this fucking sharing the way every other person in every other dinged-up metal folding chair in the circle can do, speaking an unknown language and noxious after prolonged exposure; then he sits in a bar, feeling like himself. Fuck-up, trainwreck, hopeless case: it feels like coming home. Reviewing the reality that he’s not like those people, which — that’s kind of funny, right? Drinking himself to the ground to emphasize how not an alcoholic he is? But the thing is, alcoholics — apparently! — are people who can still do shit like believe in the future and improve their lives and sincerely care about the sob stories and continued well-being of total fucking strangers. The mirage-self he imagines someone seeing in those meetings, the Quentin who decided to gamble on the hope of a better tomorrow instead of continuing to run from today, the Quentin opening his heart to a life consisting of something other than pain, the Quentin who might not have serenity and courage and wisdom but who has the sense to know that’s the magnetic north by which he should set his inner compass — well. As someone told him long ago, _that’s not him_. Not in any lifetime that counts.

He swaps out his long sleeves for the handful of T-shirts he usually reserves for sleep, but he still doesn’t have any pants that aren’t jeans. Every day, somewhere in his trudge across the city under the southern summer sun, he hits a point where he feels almost nauseated with revulsion at the horror of having a sticky and exhausted corporeal form, beads of sweat running down his denim-covered legs like bugs, and he thinks _I should buy shorts_ , and every day he doesn’t. He can’t make himself bother with either sunscreen or any of the anti-UV spells he knows so by Friday his nose is peeling and he’s developed an angry red sunburn in sharp unattractive lines below his shoulders.

*

He wakes up on Saturday at a time he feels certain in his bones is miserably early with a pounding headache because his phone is fucking ringing and simply will not stop. Quentin gropes blindly for it, refusing to let the light past his eyelids yet, and manages to ignore the call, but immediately the ringing starts up again. He is going to murder Julia, maybe. And then throw his phone in the Pacific Ocean. “What the fuck, Jules,” he says when he’s finally, against his every wish, picked up the call.

“Wow,” says a woman who is definitely not Julia, “and here I was thinking Julia had been the one getting all that famous Coldwater charm.”

“Kady?” Quentin says, instinctively sitting up in surprise and swiftly lying back down in regret. “Sorry. Hey. What’s up?”

“You texted me last night,” she says, “remember?”

“I — did?” Quentin... does not remember that. Squinting against the sun, he tries to navigate to his texts. It takes some effort.

“You texted me _this isn’t working_ , and then I texted you to ask if you wanted to talk, and then you didn’t reply for three hours and sent me a bunch of maudlin shit at three in the morning I deleted to preserve your dignity, so. I thought I should check in.”

Actually Quentin texted her _yghiss jusnt wprrkng working_ , and then — yeah, maudlin is right: _nothing works, nothing ever will work, i should have stayed dead_ … eesh. It goes on for a while. He closes the app, face burning in all the places it didn’t already hurt. “Sorry about that.”

“It happens,” she says, nicer than he would have expected. “So what’s going on?”

“Uh,” he tries. He understands that she didn’t mean to ambush him, but he’s barely prepared to be awake right now, much less to articulate something meaningful about the disaster he’s spent the week throwing himself into. He stalls by saying, “You really — don’t have to do this, like — I mean it’s really nice of you to check in, but it’s not like your responsibility or —”

Kady laughs. “Do I seem like someone who does things because they’re _nice_?”

“Well — kind of?” Quentin hedges, aiming for diplomacy. “Maybe, sometimes?”

“Maybe,” Kady agrees, half-mockingly. “Maybe I’m calling to be nice. Maybe I’m calling because you and I have never had a real conversation, but Julia cares about you a whole lot, and it turns out after everything I care about Julia a whole lot, so this is a favor for a friend. Or maybe it’s a lot more selfish than that. What if I’m calling because it’s the twelfth fucking step? What if I spent a lot of time and energy saving your life, and I feel like you drinking yourself to death before turning thirty makes that retroactively a huge waste of my time?”

This startles a laugh out of him. “That would be kind of a dick way to think about it.”

“It would, wouldn’t it,” she agrees, sounding amused. “Maybe I’m kind of a dick.”

That relaxes him, somehow. Eases some guilt he hadn’t known he was carrying from the second he picked up the phone. Quentin considers the week, opts for simplicity. “The meetings were not, like… super helpful.”

Kady says, certain and almost amused, “You hated them.”

“What — no,” Quentin lies, unconvincing to his own ears, “that’s not — why would I hate them?” _Yeah, Quentin_ , says the voice in his head, _what kind of self-obsessed dickhead would hate a roomful of people trying to help each other through their pain?_

“It’s a bunch of smug assholes crying and talking about God while pretending they’re not talking about God and sharing their fucking feelings and how every day is a _challenge_ and every day is a _blessing_ and it’s so _hard_ but they’re so _grateful_ , and every single one of them is so goddamn sincere you could just about punch them in the mouth,” Kady says. “What’s not to hate?”

“That’s —” Exactly how he feels. Like, uncannily. Bewildered Quentin says, “I thought you liked them.”

“I said I _went_ ,” she says. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Okay, but,” Quentin starts, thinking even as he says it that maybe one of these days he should try not arguing with every person who tries to help him but unable to stop, “if you _go_ , and you’d go _again_ , clearly you could, like, stand them. Clearly they didn’t —” He feels like the _make you wanna die, real bad_ is implied.

“I didn’t have a choice, the first couple times,” she says. “They were pretty much mandatory when I was locked up. Cheaper than giving any of us actual treatment. And once I got out I said _fuck this_ and didn’t go back till months later, when I’d been clean since the hospital but was having — a shitty week. Now I’ve kind of vetted the local ones, and if I need it I know which to stay the hell away from and which I’ll be able to tolerate, maybe even appreciate. But it’s been a process. And some people never feel like it clicks.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, feeling — reassured and dismayed both, somehow. “Those people, do they…” He doesn’t know what he wants to ask. _Is there hope for them_ seems kind of over the top.

“You’ll meet people in the group who say there’s no way but the group,” she says. “But I don’t really fuck around with dogma, so. To me, whatever works is whatever works.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. He should ask, now, for suggestions of other things that have worked, since clearly he’s out of ideas. But instead, throat tight, he hears himself say, “What if it’s not — the whatever. Like what if the issue is that maybe you don’t… _want_ it to work. Because obviously, I…” Obviously he doesn’t. That’s the _veritas_ in fucking _vino_ here: obviously some part of him wants to stay like this, more than he wants to survive. “What if the problem is _you_?”

Kady says, “The problem _is_ you.”

“Oh.” Quentin wasn’t expecting that. He feels unjustifiably wounded. “Well, that’s — I guess I can’t argue with that."

“I mean,” she goes on, “it’s _always_ you. It’s never just about — the thing that it’s about. Fixing that is always about fixing yourself. Some people need to do one before the other, but — it’s always you, in the end.”

That’s — better, but not helpful. “At the first one I went to,” Quentin says — he hates just saying the word, _meetings_ , it sounds like such a _thing_ — “there was this girl who talked about — about wanting to give up, and feeling like her life was worth saving. And I — I get that first part, but I don’t…” He doesn’t feel like his life is worth saving. How could he, after everything he’s done with it and everything he’s failed to do? “So even if I try something else, like — what’s the point, if I’m just…”

Kady doesn’t answer right away. Quentin wonders if she’s regretting checking in. Finally she says, “The worst part about meetings is that some of the insufferable shit they say over and over again is actually true.”

Quentin swallows. “Like what,” he asks, wondering if he’s about to get a lecture on admitting he’s powerless. Hasn’t he already done that?

“Like —” She huffs a laugh. “Like the fact that you’re not fucking special.”

Quentin feels his face flush, fingers tense. “I _know_ that by now,” he says, trying and failing not to come across defensive, “trust me, it’s been made very clear —”

“No,” Kady says, “it’s not a morality thing. It’s not about perspective, or acceptance, or any of that shit. It means — everyone wants to give up. I want to give up, at least once a week. And for a long time it was more like every fucking day. Anyone in one of those rooms is there because they know about wanting to give up.”

“But,” Quentin protests, “some part of them must have wanted to not give up, right? Or else they wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Well,” Kady says, “you called me, right?”

Quentin can’t argue against that. “I did.” He thinks again about Mayakovsky: drunk and mean and alone and so, so angry at a world in which he could have had anything, if only he’d been willing to give up his own monstrosity. Quentin wonders now if the revulsion that led him to pick up the phone was about not wanting to wind up like him, or not wanting to prove him right. Either way, somehow after so much disintegration and so many things he couldn’t manage to keep, it turns out this one stubbornness is still there, sharp and entrenched as a nail perfectly straight through wood. Rock bottom: something too much his to lose. _Dick_. “So,” he says, resigning himself to a fresh batch of trying, “what next? If it wasn’t meetings, for me, and if I’m not — what do I do?”

Kady considers this for a long moment, and Quentin feels a fresh rush of gratitude, mixed with shame after how ungracefully he’s received her advice. “Look, you _definitely_ won’t find this in the Big Book, and to a lot of people in the program it’s fucking heresy, but honestly? Sometimes if you’re killing yourself with something, it can help to switch to something that will kill you slower. To buy yourself enough time to figure something else out.”

Quentin — seriously almost says that he’s not killing himself, which. Jesus. How fucking dense can he be? “Like what,” he says instead.

“In my case,” Kady says, “honestly I don’t think I would have survived my first couple months without heroin if I hadn’t spent them getting too drunk to go find any.”

“But if drinking is the problem,” Quentin says, digging his nails painfully into his palms — damn, he really needs to cut those — because, god, that sounds so close to _drinking problem_ , which is such a fucking Hallmark phrase for — for whatever it is he does have, or is doing, or — “I mean, not that I’ve ever tried it, but my impression is the relationship doesn’t really go in reverse.”

“Yeah, _definitely_ don’t do heroin,” Kady says, laughing wryly. “But aren’t you in California right now? Didn’t they like fully legalize pot there?”

“Oh.” Quentin’s not sure — following the news is on the list of things he thinks functional adults do that he doesn’t and frankly it’s near the bottom, priority-wise — and the idea hits him as distasteful, although logically he knows this is kind of a beggars/choosers situation. “So, what, I should just — decide to become a, a stoner?”

“As opposed to a drunk?” Quentin flinches. “No hangovers, less of a tendency towards fucked up decisions you’ll wake up regretting. Hard to see the downside, for you.”

“So I’m just like” — he shakes his head, the back of his neck prickling uncomfortably — “following the Josh Hoberman method for success and happiness?”

“I think Fillory shit is keeping him too busy to get that stoned most days,” Kady says. “But also, Hoberman is probably the most emotionally stable person any of us know. So, maybe not the worst available model.”

“Ugh,” Quentin says before he can stop himself. He knows it’s idiotic, but he thinks if offered the choice, he would keep his own fucked up brain over being fucking Josh. But he called Kady for a reason, and she called him back because for whatever reason she gives a shit, so — “Okay. I’ll — try it out.”

“Today?” Kady says, because — because she knows, Quentin realizes. She knows how easily today can slip from your fingers, if you’re ambivalent about holding on.

“Fine,” he says. “I mean, I’m going to take some Advil and sleep for like four more hours first, but. I’ll text you an update. Today.”

*

He sleeps for more like six hours, actually, waking sporadically from anxious dreams to drink water and burrow his face back into the pillow, but eventually he does manage to stay upright long enough to shower and dress and locate the nearest — apparently they’re called dispensaries, suggests his search for _weed store near me_ — make his way downstairs, slipping past the kitchen where Ray is cajoling the coffee maker with a set of Shapiro Transfusions. He must be desperate; Quentin decides to stop at a coffee shop on the way. Soy latte in hand, he digs out his headphones and puts on some Hole, sturdy and bracing and reminding or reprimanding him — _come on, be alive again — don’t lay down and die_ …

The dispensary is brightly lit with a clean and open design, which — makes sense, obviously, but takes some adjustment, given his purposes. He’s a little overwhelmed by the neatly packaged, colorfully branded options — his previous experiences with weed are mostly, like, someone passing a joint around at a party — and winds up succumbing to the offer of recommendations from a smiley bearded employee in a yellow uniform T-shirt, walking out with a plastic bag ( _Reusable and Recyclable At Your Local Drop-Off!_ says the bold green text on the bottom, with a URL for San Diego plastic bag recycling locations) filled with a mix of weirdly gourmet-looking edibles and bags of just, like, pot. When he’s back in his room he opens up the package of rolling paper even though he sucks at rolling, briefly missing Julia whose precise fingers always made perfect joints, and fumbles his way towards something smokable because he’s getting that termites-in-his-brain-stem feeling and he doesn’t want to wait for his digestive system to catch up. Plus, every second he spends smoking this is one he’s not smoking a cigarette, so. Maybe he can kill two birds with one substitute vice.

It’s been a while since he smoked up and way longer than he did so without already being half fucked up on something else; he kind of overshoots his imagined target level of inebriation and winds up belatedly noticing he’s giggling to himself while fidgeting with a joint that has long since gone out, but once he’s there it’s hard to mind. Hard to mind that, or anything else, really. The sun is shining still and he hasn’t eaten all day and the thought of literally any food sounds amazing and the music in his ears is good, like really good, like has he ever noticed how good it was before, not just this music but like, any music, the human invention of _sounds_ that sound like _feelings_ , like — Quentin’s an idiot, this is a great idea, what the fuck was he even doing before this?

*

So he starts smoking, fine, not insignificant, one could say “copious,” amounts of weed, like amounts that some people might consider potentially concerning, with possibly alarming frequency, but it seems more survivable than the alternatives: more tolerable than being sober, less debilitating than being drunk (and frankly, if he’s counting only his most recent experiences with alcohol, it’s more tolerable than those, too). He’s not particularly useful, but he already wasn’t, and after that first afternoon he more or less gets the hang of dosing it so he spends most of his day closer to “mellowed out” than “out of his mind.” Life is raw; everybody medicates. Or maybe they don’t, but he can now go multiple hours at a time without wanting to bash his own skull in with an industrial stapler, and at this point he can’t really bring himself to give a shit about what other people do or don’t need to get to that level.

And the thing is, in his heart, in his brain, even in his handful of unfiltered moments in the morning, he really and truly believes — it’s not _not_ helping. Like, yeah, he spends several hours watching the video for “My Girls” feeling like despite having listened to this album a lot in eleventh grade he’s never before understood this song which was meant to be transmitted psychically as in that form the listener can understand that its glistening rhythms are in fact perfectly synchronized to the beating heart of reality itself and so the experience becomes one of feeling your skull gently unzipped so that a disembodied ice cream scoop can dispense the secrets of the universe unmediated into your brain, not that he can say what those secrets are, but it’s nice to feel them nestling in there — but he does other stuff, too. He gets up in the morning, like actually _up_ in the actual _morning_ , because he doesn’t feel like his temples are being kicked in by steel-toed boots, and then he smokes a bit and makes his way downstairs to eat and have normal conversations about shit like where in Brooklyn Cynthia grew up (Crown Heights) and if she ever misses the city (sometimes, but never during the winter) and old stories from the Usenet group where Ray and Toni met. He hangs around for movies in the living room and talks about Star Trek on the back porch with Rishi and helps out with kitchen prep for Taco Tuesday and discovers that Nico is, in retrospect not surprisingly, kind of a weed nerd, and they spend an evening watching weird Netflix sketch comedy and laughing until they can’t breathe. He texts Julia without being texted first, and when he tells her to say hi to Penny he actually kind of means it; he texts Kady _this was a great idea_ , and she texts back _you told me that three hours ago_ , which — whatever. No one’s perfect.

Quentin takes a walk around the bay, just because it’s nice out and he doesn’t want to die, dazzled by the subtle shifting of the breeze and the sun on the waves and the cascading synths blowing up his ears, the line like some primal chant again and again, _it isn’t much that I think I need_ , and thinks — maybe not, actually! Wouldn’t that be something. The distant awareness that the feeling is kind of fake doesn’t make it less fun to chew over. All his feelings are fake and/or stupid anyway; if he’s going to torture himslef with the shitty ones, he deserves to enjoy the decent ones, no matter how he comes to them. Approaching Mission Beach he spots a loudly colored shop advertising _Great Deals!_ in giant red comic book letters on the window and walks in and buys some goddamn shorts, preemptively appreciating their forgiving drawstrings and not even mad about it. While he’s there he picks up some swim trunks, because Luisa mentioned maybe gathering a crew for a beach day and he had at the time enthusiastically assented to be gathered and he should probably by then own a pair that’s actually his, and pair of flip-flops, because come on already, and a handful of sleeveless novelty shirts because in the moment the idea of wearing them strikes him as extremely hilarious. By the time he gets home, the amusement has worn off somewhat, but he decides to keep them because every time he wears a T-shirt in public he’s acutely aware of feeling like everyone in Southern California sweats less than he does, and because they’ll be a useful deterrent the next time he gets the urge to climb into bed for something he’ll regret. Hard to fuck the pain away in a neon green tank reading NOBODY LIKES A SHADY BEACH, right? He opens his drawers to store his new purchases and stares at the mess of bunched-up fabric inside them before deciding on an impulse fueled by his recent exponential increase in daily activity to take everything out and put it away for real this time, sorted and folded, including the fucking underwear, without a psychic collapse in sight, and when he’s done he feels like maybe these are the drawers of a person with a future that doesn’t always hurt to think about. It takes him like two hours because he keeps getting distracted or thinking he’s folded wrong and then remembering that’s how geometry works, but. It’s a start.

*

“Seriously, Montana was fascinating from like, a sociological perspective,” Julia is saying into the phone. “Almost all the groups we met were families of some kind, and most of them until recently had no idea how many people like them there were out there unless there was someone young enough to have stumbled onto magic shit online. Honestly a lot of the older ones, I think they still don’t really get it, that there’s a whole world out there for them, if they want it… but all that shit about hedges burning out, that was so clearly not the case for these people who were doing things that had been in their families for generations. Some of them were insanely powerful — like I could feel it coming off them once we got them unmarked — but they knew almost no spells. It was such a clear example of the potential that’s out there if we can get people communicating, if we can get information to the people who can use it.” She laughs, deep and warm. “I was passing out contact info like candy.”

“That’s awesome,” Quentin says.

“So what’s new with you?”

“I basically quit drinking,” he offers.

“Oh yeah?” Surprised, polite, trying not to sound as curious as she clearly is; Quentin smiles to himself.

“I mean,” he allows, “I’m smoking like, a _lot_ more weed. But. I don’t dry heave every time I wake up now. It’s, like. Natural. Plus, a couple sour gummy worms are like eight billion fewer calories than a bottle of wine, so. Basically it’s a healthy choice, I think, if we’re grading on a curve, which —” He shrugs to himself. “Probably we should, right?”

“Okay,” says Julia, slowly, like she’s trying to process this information. “I’m not sure that’s the exact calculus I would make, but… if you’re feeling better, then, you know. That’s great.”

“I am,” he says. “I’m, you know. Going outside. Hanging out with people, whatever. I went for a jog yesterday.”

“Nice!” He can picture her pleased grin. “How was it?”

“Horrible, Julia,” he says, “it was so, so bad.” He had made the decision on a whim because the goal is to get his shit together and the pot makes him feel admittedly counterintuitively like that might actually be possible and he had some notion that people who had their shit together exercised and running seemed like the exercise option that had the fewest prerequisite steps. A few bouncing steps out on Riviera he had started gasping for air, and then developed a stitch in his side like a fish being gutted alive, and his calves had started to hurt, and his lungs had started to ache, and his skin had burned like an overheated laptop, and his hair had stuck to his face with sweat, and when he couldn’t stand it anymore he had stopped dead in his tracks and immediately had to lurch towards the nearest garbage can to puke, and then he’d taken out his phone to look at the app he’d downloaded and discovered his superhuman physical effort had lasted, apparently, three-fourths of a mile. Now every single muscle in his legs hurts, and so do some in his butt? “How do people do this for fun?”

“I don’t know if _fun_ is exactly the word,” Julia says consideringly. “But you were probably going too fast. Beginners always do. Even when you’re more experienced, most of your miles should be slow enough that you could carry a conversation.”

“Okay,” he protests, “that’s just called walking.”

Julia laughs. “You have to ease into it. There are tons of beginner programs online, I can send you a good one if you want.”

“Sure, that sounds great,” he says. “If I can ever move again.”

“What shoes are you using?”

Quentin glances down at the same black Converse he uses for everything, fraying laces loosely tied. “Uh, sneakers?”

“Okay but like — not your Converse, right?”

“What’s wrong with Converse?”

“Q!” Julia exclaims, like he’s committed some major breach of etiquette. “They have like _no_ support, you’ll give yourself shin splints. Did you at least stretch afterwards?”

“I’m supposed to run _and_ stretch?” Quentin groans. His new will to live is being stretched thin. “That’s too many things, Julia.”

“Don’t think of it as a separate thing,” Julia says. “It’s all part of helping you run. That’s like saying, eating _and_ using a fork is too many things, which would be crazy, right?”

Quentin surveys the detritus he keeps not getting around to cleaning up of his recent — meals is a strong word for the type of food he’s been eating when no one is around: empty boxes of cereal eaten by the fistful, stacks of wax paper that once held donuts, single-slice coverings of Kraft American cheese, plastic Entenmann’s wrappers. “Right.”

“You really do sound better,” Julia says. Her happiness is so real in her voice and Quentin loves her so much that for a second he thinks his heart might explode out of his chest. But like, in a good way. “I’m glad. But seriously — buy some actual sneakers, if you’re going to get into running. If you think it’s no fun starting up, try getting injured.”

“Okay, Coach Wicker,” he says, and she laughs again, easy, and he feels like something between them has started knitting itself back together. Like a scratch healing over, or a bone that’s been set.

*

He’s at the dining table at the start of August, looking over Luisa’s shoulder at the list of groceries they’re getting ready to pick up, when over by the kitchen counter Rishi says, “ _Shit_.”

They look at each other, then over at him, staring at his phone in dismay. “Is it the coffee maker?” Luisa asks. “I think Toni’s almost done overthinking the model for the new one, if that makes you feel better. In the meantime, I had luck earlier trying a variant on Heller someone showed me.”

Rishi shakes his head. “Not the coffee maker.” He joins them at the table, shoulders slumping. “I was supposed to have an assistant joining me,” he tells them. “Third year master’s student, has friends she wanted to visit out here so she hopped on my project for fieldwork credit. There’s been some kind of family emergency so she’s stayed home so far, but she thought she’d be able to make it — tomorrow’s the last day I can get out there and stay on schedule, and she just texted me that things have taken a turn for the worse and doesn’t think she’ll be coming out all summer. Which obviously sucks for her, but.”

“That blows,” Luisa says; Quentin nods sympathetically. “And you can’t do what you need to by yourself?”

Rishi shakes his head. “The spell I’m developing, it’s too much power to run solo. It needs a second person for safe channeling.”

“What kind of magic is it?” Quentin asks. “Maybe I can help.” A kind of soft glow spreads in his chest because — this is how it works, right? Bit by bit, remembering how to live a life that doesn’t feel like dying. He used to be a person who wanted to help people, he thinks, and maybe he was never very good at it, but — maybe that’s something he can try again.

Rishi looks at him, eyebrows high. “Seriously? That would be a life-saver.”

Quentin shrugs. “I don’t exactly have a lot going on at the moment. I’m not a hauntologist, but I’ve — seen ghosts before. Depending on what you need I can probably swing it.”

“Well ghost shit is all energy work,” Rishi says. “And you’d just be running base, probably, to keep it manageable — I’m ninety percent sure all the complicated shit I can do on my own, although I won’t know until I go mark the choreo tomorrow.”

“The what?” Quentin says.

“Choreo,” Rishi says. “Like choreography. Hauntologists have a weird set of humor — it’s what we call the movement pattern of a closed-loop or semi-closed haunting. I’ve got the theoretical framework all worked out, but it needs to be tailored to what’s actually happening. That’s why I’m driving out tomorrow — observe a couple repetitions, get down the relevant details. Technically I could do that alone, but if you can make it that would probably help. Ghosts can be… distracting. These are pretty contained, according to the literature, but. I wouldn’t want to be trying a new cooperative spell my first time at a site. But it’s up to you, I mean, you’re doing me this huge favor.”

“It’s not a problem,” Quentin says, unexpectedly grateful, feeling like maybe Rishi has it the other way around. “I can go tomorrow.”

*

They drive out about an hour before sunset, in the car Rishi’s borrowing for the summer from his parents who have recently relocated to Sacramento. “Thanks again for doing this,” he says as they’re waiting at a red light.

“Sure,” Quentin says, tapping his fingers against his knee. It had occurred to him earlier in the afternoon that it would probably be ideal to show up for this in full control of his faculties, so he’d reluctantly let himself come down and stay down and spent the afternoon bouncing between anyone around to provide some distraction and smoking out his bedroom window, going through more cigarettes in a few hours than he has all the rest of the week. By now he’s a little wound up. “So what kind of haunting is this?”

“Your pretty standard five-oh-three series, subtype A,” Rishi says. “Murder-suicide, four figures, closed loop. It’s one of the better documented hauntings in the country, actually. A lot of universities in the West use it in introductory classes, and it’s totally impermeable as far as anyone’s ever seen. I figured between that and the single-day calendrical syncing, it’d be a good candidate — those are the kinds of sites neo-exorcism techniques have had the most success with in the past couple years.”

“Wait,” Quentin says, his stomach knotting uncomfortably. “Did you say murder-suicide?”

Rishi glances at him, thick brows knit together in concern above his glasses. “Shit. I should have told you before — is that going to be a problem?” Quentin can’t tell if there’s an undercurrent of specificity to his concern. He can’t imagine Rishi doesn’t know about the Seam, but he hasn’t brought it up, and Quentin’s definitely not about to right now. “I’m sorry, you said you’d seen ghosts and I’m just so used to spending all my time around people who are neck-deep in this stuff — I didn’t think about —”

“It’s fine,” Quentin says, waving him off with what he hopes is a casual smile and willing his nerves to calm down. He has seen ghosts; he knew he wasn’t signing up to watch a bunch of dead choirboys sing Christmas carols. He doesn’t know why this is — “Surprised me, is all. But it’s cool.”

“You sure?” Rishi says. He’s looking at the road now, but biting his lip. “I can do this part on my own, ask around my network for —”

“No,” Quentin says, “I swear. It’s fine.” And it will be, he tells himself sternly. Whatever happened there and keeps happening, it has nothing to do with him.

*

In La Jolla Rishi finds a parking spot and then leads Quentin to an abandoned lot at the end of a block on a residential street. “This is the place?” Quentin says skeptically as they approach; it doesn’t look haunted. But then he steps closer and feels an undeniable wave of cold foreboding down his neck. “Oh.”

Rishi nods, studying a handheld meter of some kind. “Yeah. The ectoplasmic radiation is concentrated as hell for phenomena like this; that’s why no one’s ever built over it. Even the normies get bad vibes. I should have asked earlier, but — you know the Baxter Keys?”

A set of revealing spells; Quentin had to demonstrate them for the oral midterm in Lipson’s first semester survey. “It’s been a while, but yeah.”

“It’ll show up for people like us eventually,” Rishi says, “but number three will get us in crystal clear right away. Here, why don’t we —” He sets his meter on the ground and faces Quentin, hands in position; Quentin mirrors him, the cooperative version of the spell a bit of a shortcut. As their hands spin a glowing square between them he can see the lot changing in his peripheral vision; when they break it off to complete the spell, he turns and watches a small two-story house come into existence from the ground up, growing smooth as a film wipe. It’s colder now; Quentin feels himself shiver, wishing for once he’d worn his jeans.

They head for the door but once they reach it, Rishi grabs Quentin’s wrist and waits for him to meet his eyes before saying, “Sorry if this is condescending or whatever, but — I know it took me a while to get used to it, and I’ve devoted my career to this shit, so — just remember, it’s not real. I mean, it’s real, ghosts are real, but it’s just — it’s just energy. It feels real to us because it acts on our senses and moves us through space, but it’ll all be gone by morning.”

Quentin nods, and Rishi opens the door to let them in.

The house, or the not-house, is ordinary enough, if clearly preserved in time: lime green shag carpeting in the living room, orange patterned linoleum in the kitchen. Rishi checks something on his phone and then indicates Quentin should follow him over to the spot under the floating staircase, where they sit on the floor and Rishi takes his laptop out from his bag and begins to make notes.

“Girls,” calls a voice. A dark-haired woman walks in from the kitchen that was empty seconds before — late twenties, early thirties maybe, wearing a polka-dot dress and a faded blue apron. With a start Quentin realizes she can’t be much older than he is by now. “Wash your hands and come downstairs.”

Footsteps shake the empty stairs above them; at the bottom two little girls materialize, one then the other, brown braids swinging behind them. Quentin feels a surge of nausea and can’t fight back the thought quickly enough — he didn’t think there would be kids. He didn’t think he’d be watching kids — but what did he think, what did he think murder-suicide, four figures, meant, what did he expect — it’s fine, he tells himself, just the, what did Rishi say, the ectoplasmic radiation being super concentrated, giving him the old-fashioned heebie-jeebies; all he needs to do is sit here and stay calm —

The woman is telling her daughters to set the table while they bicker over whose turn it is to do the silverware when there’s the sound of the front door opening, but when Quentin glances back the door, or not-door, hasn’t moved. Rishi takes notice of this too, making a quick nod to himself and typing something in. Some — some thick foreboding nothing makes heavy steps drawing closer, some inarticulable _badness_ coming near. Quentin tries to breathe, but each inhale seems to fill his lungs with dread.

The woman turns to the nothing, smiles. “David,” she says, warm but with a hint of habitual apprehension; the girls stop their bickering, chorus a sing-song “Hi, Daddy.” On a second look, the woman’s face grows concerned. “What’s wrong?”

There’s a man now where the nothing stood; a man in a suit and a briefcase, an expression of despair on his pale face, emanating dark intent. “I’m done,” he says, deep voice ragged like it’s ripping itself apart. “We’re ruined.”

The woman’s lines of concern deepen; the girls step closer together, exchanging inscrutable sisterly glances. “What happened?”

“There’s nothing,” he says. “Nothing else I can —” He reaches into his suit jacket pocket and takes out a gun and Quentin —

— can’t breathe doesn’t want to —

— three steps forward; _Daddy, no_ —

— the glint of the light on the pistol aiming at —

— _David_ , a fear in it he’s never heard a human voice make, _David, David_ —

— two little girls running to their mother like there’s anything left she can do —

— the thunderclap gunshot, the hideous gravity of collapse, all that fucking blood spreading behind her —

— her sister crying like a wild animal in a trap —

— gun to the temple, the stench of death —

— finger curling on the trigger to —

Quentin is outside. He’s running, actually; stops at the corner just short of plunging into the street into the path of an oncoming truck. Heart pounding, gasping for air; he doubles over, hands on his knees to catch his breath, then squats down, dizzy and nauseous, feels bile rising and leans over to puke in the gutter. Stays kneeling there, hunched over, coughing; he’s really gotta cut back, some distant part of him inanely thinks. Trying not to remember —

— three steps forward; _Daddy, no_ —

— running to their mother like there’s anything left —

— the body falling and all that fucking blood —

— _It goes bad fast here —_

Footsteps slap the pavement behind him and Quentin turns around in terror, sure it’s the man with the gun come to find him. But it’s only Rishi, running after him to check up on his total fucking freakout. Of course it’s only Rishi; ghosts don’t work like that, Quentin knows. His heartbeat is still too loud and his hands are still shaking but but the adrenaline is draining from his system and terror is seeping out, leaving a growing embarrassment in his wake. It’s not real; fucking idiot. It never was.

Rishi stands above him, leans down, big eyes dark with worry. “Man, I am _so_ fucking sorry,” he says, “I never should have —”

“It’s fine,” Quentin hears himself say, “it’s — I’m sorry, I don’t know why I —”

— three steps forward; _Daddy, no_ —

— _It goes bad fast here_ —

— finger curling on the trigger to —

“— seriously,” Rishi is saying, “it’s — I didn’t even think about what it’s like your first couple times, I should have just come out here alone and then emailed around to see if I could —”

“I’ve seen ghosts before,” Quentin says, inexplicably stubborn on this point, “and you told me what it was, it’s not like — I mean I knew what I was getting into, I knew what to expect.”

“But it’s not the same,” Rishi says quietly. “Knowing versus — living it.”

Quentin can’t argue with that. Ducking his eyes, he dematerializes the mess he made on the curb.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rishi says. “Come on, I’ll buy you a — a drink, or an ice cream sundae, or — whatever you want, okay?”

Quentin’s exhausted suddenly. He starts to nod in agreement, but then he remembers — “I thought you said you had to, uh. Watch it a couple times, to make sure you — had everything.”

Rishi hesitates just long enough for Quentin to know that’s true. “It’s fine,” he says, putting on a smile, “like I said, there’s a ton of literature on this one, I got most of what I needed — I should be able to piece together the spell from there.”

Quentin shakes his head. “But you — you said this was the last night you could come out to observe — you shouldn’t be taking chances, if there’s some — crucial detail you missed, that will fuck your meta-math, or whatever.”

“I’m not about to drag you back in there,” Rishi says firmly, like he’s looking out for him, and Quentin flinches in humiliation. “And I can’t just — leave you here on the street like this alone, so — it’s fine. I’ll make it work. Or I won’t, and I’ll live with it. It’s not a big deal.”

He’s trying — Quentin appreciates how hard he’s trying. But beneath the brightness of his tone is an unmistakable wistfulness. “It’s your research,” Quentin says. “It is a big deal. This is, I mean this could decide how the next couple years of your career go, right?” Rishi avoids his eye, shrugs. “Look —” Quentin digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Right now I feel like shit, yes. And I’m going to feel like shit no matter what. But in, I don’t know, three hours, or tomorrow, or whenever, I’m going to feel a lot worse if you bailed on this for me than if you just — go in there and get what you need. So — so just go, and when you’re done, we can deal with me then.”

Rishi worries at his bottom lip. “Are you sure?”

“A hundred percent,” Quentin says, putting as much certainty into his voice as he can. He feels like he’s five seconds from falling apart, but what he’s saying is true. He’ll hate himself exponentially more in the morning if Rishi abandons his plan because Quentin was too fucking fragile to deal. “If you’re really worried about me, this is the best thing you could do.”

Rishi takes this in for another moment, then nods. “Okay. If you say so. But after, dinner’s on me. I insist.”

Quentin manages a smile. “Sure.” Rishi gives him a last concerned once-over, then sprints back down the block, disappearing into the ether at what already appears to Quentin like just an empty lot.

Quentin — wants to chemically pulverize his brain, like, immediately, but Rishi will probably have a guilt-induced heart attack if he can’t find him when he’s done, so he stays put. He does fish in his pocket for his cigarettes and light one with a spell, because — whatever. Fuck this stupid state. Inhales, sucking at the relief; holds; exhales; repeats. Tries to focus on the comforting rhythm and the chemical reaction and the orange light and the smoke and not on —

—three steps forward; _Daddy, no_ —

— _It goes bad fast here_ —

Stupid, fucking — fucking stupid. It already happened, it’s not real, he thinks, and he doesn’t know if he’s talking about the bodies falling in the little house down the street or his magic breaking him apart in the moment after he decided to die.

*

“I’m really sorry,” Rishi says for maybe the fortieth time in the past hour. They’re at an In-N-Out, because Californians will not fucking shut up about those and Quentin is sick of not knowing what the fuss is about. It’s... fine. It’s great right now, actually, salty and dense, perfect comfort food after the horror-indignity double-punch of the house in La Jolla, but like. It’s tier-above-Wendy’s burgers and milkshakes three steps away from being straight-up melted ice cream. A reliable formula, but it’s not exactly a masterstroke of culinary innovation. Shake Shack with shorter lines and West Coast vibes.

“I’m okay,” Quentin promises, dipping a fry in ketchup. “I freaked out there, but — I’m kind of a person who freaks out a lot, so. A, I should have seen that coming, and B, I’m kind of used to it.” He tries to smile to make this sound more wry than depressing.

Rishi still looks guilty as hell. It’s not making Quentin feel better. “You’re not — it’s like, it’s the thing where anyone who spends a lot of time on some fucked-up shit, they become kind of robotic about it, right? Because you have to compartmentalize or you’ll go nuts. I mean, after-hours parties at our conferences, people just start drinking and one-upping each other on like, the most maimed apparition we’ve seen, or the longest a ghost has tormented us when we didn’t take the right precautions. It’s kind of sick but it’s a coping mechanism, you know? My parents are doctors, they do the same thing with people — coding in the O.R., or whatever. You forget the rest of the world still has normal feelings about shit like, blood and death and fucking murder. So don’t — you shouldn’t feel like, this says something about you.” He’s looking at Quentin with an intense sincerity and again Quentin wonders if he knows about the Seam. He must, right? But someone so curious, someone who literally thinks about post-death shit professionally — he would have mentioned it, if he did. Maybe he was too busy with class to stay up on news last year. “Any introductory hauntology class is going to be filled with this kind of reaction, I promise. At Featherstone, before grad students start teaching, we have to do this mandatory seminar series on the emotional component of supporting students in the field.”

Quentin gets it; he remembers professors from his undergrad days lighting up, a little, talking about some national catastrophe or historical atrocity, not because they enjoyed human suffering but because they loved knowing enough to find the fascination even in something terrible. He’s really not mad. “How did you stick with it?” he asks, trying to steer the subject into something Rishi might enjoy talking about enough to distract him from the topic of Quentin’s mental unhealth. “If it’s so — how it is.”

Rishi shrugs, gives an abashed smile. “I mean, I compartmentalize well. I wanted to be an emergency room physician, before, so. I guess I was always going to go into a field that required you to be able to shut some things down.”

“Before you found out about magic?”

“No, actually,” Rishi says, “for a while into my first degree — I found out at eighteen, recruited by Ravensdale for their undergrad program. But, you know.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Becoming a magician is one thing, telling your Indian parents their son’s not gonna be a doctor is another.” They both laugh, then Rishi shakes his head a little. “I shouldn’t say that. It’s an easy joke, but mine aren’t really like that. Well — my dad can be, a little. But my mom’s super chill. They’re not magicians, but — I’ve told them, about me, and they’re supportive.” He puts a finger to his lips. “Ssh, don’t let anyone know.”

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Quentin says, miming zipping up his lips. “So what changed?”

“I had a professor, sophomore year,” Rishi says. “For the basic Physical course, principles of kinetics, mending methodology, that kind of thing.” Quentin tries not to wince. “She could see I was really passionate about — not just magic, but — thinking about magic. Talking about magic. Asking questions, looking for answers, asking better questions. She encouraged me to consider grad school seriously, said she’d help with my applications and write my recs and all that. And once she kind of gave me permission to think about it, I realized that’s what I really wanted.”

Quentin nods. It’s a life lost to him, now, but he remembers — a bright red A on the front of eighteen pages on consciousness in the poems of John Ashbery, barely legible cursive beneath it reading, once he could make it out, _This shows graduate-level potential — come to office hours if you want to talk about possibilities for after your degree_. Back then it had felt like that was the thing that might set his life to rights for good. Maybe he should have stuck to that plan. “Why hauntology?”

Rishi looks down at his fries, silent; chewing at his lip. Quentin wonders if he’s thinking about the Seam, if the polite thing to do at this point would be to lean over and say _It’s okay, I promise you can explain your weird death job to me and I won’t fall apart again just because one time I died_. But he’s begun enjoying this: the chance to get to know something without that one fact of his past dominating the space between them. He wants to keep that going, even if, he realizes with a twinge of guilt, it might be fake. Rishi will be gone in a few weeks anyway. It can’t hurt to pretend that much longer, if that’s what they’re doing.

“When we were kids,” Rishi says, still not looking up, “a friend invited my little sister to spend a week with her family down in Belmar. I guess they rented a house there every summer. It was Layla’s first time being away from home for more than a night — she was like, _so_ excited. She got to borrow my sleeping bag.” Quentin’s heart swells like it’s been stung. He knows how this story ends. “The nanny took the kids out to the beach one day, and it was... windy, or whatever. I guess she ran into some friend of hers, got distracted — they were _way_ too young to be swimming in open water that unsupervised. Layla, uh…” Rishi blinks hard; a muscle in his jaw clenches.

“I’m so sorry,” Quentin says, his own eyes stinging.

Rishi nods, an acknowledgement that doesn’t pretend there’s anything anyone can say that would mean something real. “A while after, word made its way to us that there had been reports of — it turned out that on some nights, when the conditions are right, you can still — hear her. The way she sounded, right before —” His throat tightens, Adam’s apple spasming; he takes a shaky breath, then another.

“I can’t imagine,” Quentin whispers. It hurts just to think of it: knowing that a piece of the worst thing that’s ever happened to you is out there, still happening. Never not happening. That you’ll never wake up in a world where it’s actually over.

— _It goes bad fast here_.

A little too loudly Rishi says, “The moon was in its first quarter that night — there’s been some really interesting hypothesizing recently about lunar correlations with the likelihood of sonic apparitions in particular following an instigating event, especially around shorelines…”

Quentin can see what he’s doing — folding the memory to put away in the elegant box of theory, all its sharp edges once more safely behind a barrier where they can’t break the skin. That, he understands. “Places that experience tidal activity,” he offers, “are typically more sensitive to lunar circumstance, right?”

“Right,” Rishi says, nodding. He meets Quentin’s eyes and Quentin thinks there’s something grateful in his. “It’s not a linear relationship, but a ton of hauntings are lunarly synced — so far they’ve been thought impossible to scrub, but. Until fifteen years ago, exorcism was thought to be limited to your nameless apparitions — poltergeists, dybbuks, that kind of thing. It wasn’t until Hirsch cleared that abbey in Edinburgh that anyone had proven any major entities could be cleared. And the subfield is still so new — it’s a really exciting time to get into it, actually. So — so that’s why I, you know. Because even if I can’t — even if I never — maybe, whatever research I do in my lifetime lays the groundwork for someone, someday…” He shrugs, gives a watery smile.

“Yeah. I get that.” Quentin doesn’t want to think, but he does: if there was a room in the hospital in Englewood where every twenty-eight days Ted Coldwater’s voice was moaning in pain or crying for morphine or wondering where his son was… He refocuses on Rishi to push the image aside, but not before knowing: he would do anything. Anything at all, for the slightest possibility that one day that might stop. “So,” he says, feeling his stomach drop in resignation before he’s registered what he’s about to do, “the spell — your research project. When do you think you’ll have it ready for me to learn?”

Rishi’s eyebrows shoot up. “Quentin, you don’t have to —”

“I kind of feel like I do.” He shrugs. “Or maybe I don’t, but — I want to. I want to help. And now — I mean you said it yourself, right? This was partly for me to, to know what I’m dealing with, and now I know, so. I’ll keep it together next time. It’s not like it’s going to be any worse.”

Rishi still looks uncertain. “Are you sure?”

“Actually,” Quentin says, and he feels the corner of his mouth lifting because he wasn’t expecting this, didn’t quite believe anything in him was left to be sure, and now, somehow, in this of all things — “yeah. Yeah, I really am.”

*

The best thing about transposing your life three thousand miles away from anyone you know is that no one is around to tell you to go to therapy just because you had one little anxiety attack at a haunted house. But his meltdown does drive home the reality that because of the unfortunate human need to “go places” and “do things,” spending the rest of his life baked half out of his mind is not actually a sustainable plan; at some point he will have to redevelop the skillset of experiencing things with his whole unfiltered self. Which Quentin knew, obviously, but had been ignoring, because it sucks and he doesn’t want to.

He still doesn’t want to, and he also doesn’t feel much urgency on the matter — ghosts notwithstanding, the demands on his life are presently conveniently limited — but he thinks that he should start at least thinking about the future he allegedly wants to have, and that maybe he can use its current distance for some benefit. Maybe he can start attempting to put into place the things he’ll eventually need, right now when he’s content most days not to need anything except decent snacks and some totally legal drugs, so nothing feels like an emergency, and it’s not a catastrophe if he fails. Like his cushioned existence is a set of reality training wheels. It doesn’t seem like the dumbest idea he’s ever had.

So he doesn’t buy running shoes, because that’s a lot of steps and a lot of effort for what seems like a minor payoff, but he does keep running, or jogging, or trying to jog, very poorly, for brief and agonizing stretches of time in the mornings, before he’s smoked, while the day is cooler. It still sucks, unbelievably, like how come digging your nails into your cuticles until they bleed counts as “self-harm” but making your _entire body_ hurt is considered “healthy,” what’s up with _that_ , but he does it, to prove that he can. He creates a text file named THINGS TO DO and starts listing concepts he feels like he should eventually master as they come to mind (eat more vegetables; read a book; job???), and he doesn’t make any progress on them but it makes him feel a little better to see them written down. He googles _good hobbies to have_ , because the people at the meetings he went to talked not infrequently about needing to fill their lives with new things once booze was no longer an option and he’s probably not an alcoholic but he still cannot remember how he used to spend his days, and on an excitingly optimistic impulse orders a whittling knife with some blocks of wood, a stack of origami paper, a calligraphy set targeted at twelve-year-olds, a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Yoda’s face, and a secondhand guitar.

Training wheels, right? Or like, those floaties they give to little kids when they’re learning how to swim. Something to fight against the gravity of his own bad habits until he can handle the motions necessary to keep himself afloat. Maybe somewhere in there, he’ll wake up one day and all on his own feel like he wants to do something other than drown.

*

“So,” Rishi says, “I’ve written out your part for you — we should probably practice it once before we go back to the site, but I was able to keep your side pretty standard. It’s mostly a matter of managing the flow, keeping it from overcharging; the directive stuff I’ll be handling.” He hands Quentin a sheet of looseleaf with the spell charted out in tiny but legible black ink. “I can give you the CliffsNotes of the theory behind it if you want, but this is really all you need to work it.”

Quentin has been sober all day and is getting twitchy, but he says, “Lay it on me.” Rishi looks minutely surprised, and Quentin smiles. “I don’t promise to understand it, but — I like theory.” He likes theory enough, anyway; what he really likes is watching people talk about the thing they want to talk about. Julia and big ideas or the best seasons of Buffy, Alice and meta-math or, weirdly, horses. Eliot and theme parties, once upon a time, a thought that only sort of makes him want to hammer a nail into his palm. Progress!

“Okay,” Rishi says, clearly pleased; Quentin’s pleased to have made him so. “So — have you heard of phantom limb syndrome?”

The phrase sounds familiar, but he can’t place it. “I might have read it in a _New Yorker_ article once?”

“So in amputees,” Rishi explains, starting to talk with his hands, “people who lose a limb they were born with, they often report feeling sensations in the limb that’s not there anymore. Pain, burning, muscle cramps. It’s a mismatch between what the brain was used to doing — getting information from four limbs — and what it needs to do now — understanding that there are only three. And one treatment that’s been used for this issue is called mirror therapy. You set up a mirror reflecting the arm they still have, for example, and angle it so that when they look into it, it’s like the reflection is the arm that’s been removed. And then the brain can sort of metaphorically or cognitively let go of it, because it thinks it can see it. Almost like it has something to let go of. In some case studies the phantom sensation has disappeared entirely over time.”

“Whoa,” Quentin says, trying to picture the set-up. “That’s in medicine?”

“Crazy, right?” Rishi shakes his head, grinning like he’s thrilled by the weirdness of the concept. “But I was thinking, some kind of principle like this might be applicable to these literal phantoms. Ghosts, they’re stuck and they don’t know they’re stuck, right? Like the brain's convinced there’s something there that still hurts — they’re not real, but they can’t get themselves out, because they think they’re still in the moment that’s been preserved. And we can’t communicate with them, not meaningfully — we can provide them with stimuli that they respond to, but we can’t shake up their understanding of who they are. We can’t tell them, hey, you’re dead, you don’t need to keep torturing yourself with this. You can go be at peace. And if you look through the literature hauntologists have pretty much always treated this as the gap we need to bridge — we need to give them a way to listen to us, or force them to hear what we’re saying. But what I’ve been thinking is, maybe it’s not about us at all. Maybe the capacity to understand is inside them, but they can’t reach it, because there’s nothing for them to hang it on to. And maybe what we need to do, or what we can do for them, is not to tell them what they are, but to give them a way to see what they were, long enough to adjust their awareness of what they are now.”

“A mirror,” Quentin says, trying to follow.

“Yeah,” says Rishi. “A real mirror wouldn’t do it, I don’t think — there’s never been evidence of a ghost integrating material information into future cycles. But a couple years ago a guy in Tokyo published a technique, what we call now a Taniyama Pool, that sort of combines the core of a lot of revelation spells with a reflective element, to reveal and display simultaneously, and there’s already a bunch of applications to energetic manifestations, which ghosts obviously are… My thinking is, if we can hold that up for them, kind of surround them with it like a funhouse — show them what they are _and_ who they were, that dissonance — then maybe the magic of it, operating on their basic wavelength, shifting with their movements, lets them see themselves enough to move on. Which is, to be frank, either completely brilliant of me or totally nonsensical.” Quentin laughs. “But even if it fails, we’ll have more information, so. That’s the fucking process.”

“Wow. Okay then.” Quentin reads through the spell — there’s an incantation in Greek he’ll have to practice till he can say it without tripping over the syllables, but most of it’s a mix of familiar sequences strung together creatively. “You want to practice the opening tuts a couple times so I have the tempo right when I’m going over it?”

“That’s a good idea,” Rishi says, and Quentin looks at his work one more time, thinking that he hasn’t done this part since he left New York, and puts it down so he can set his hands in the position he’ll use to cast.

*

He’s in the kitchen slicing up zucchini for the pasta Luisa’s making for a group dinner that night when he catches her using unfamiliar magic to light the burner on the stove. Not just unfamiliar — odd in some way he can’t identify; less of a practiced set of movements than something softer, like a suggestion of the magic he knows.

“What’s that spell?” Quentin asks, curious. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”

“Oh, I don’t know if it has a name,” Luisa says. “I learned it from my mother.”

“Your mother was a magician?” he says. “Or a hedge?”

Luisa salts the water and covers the pot. “She wouldn’t have used either one of those words, but — yeah, I guess. She knew some things. Got them from her mother, who got them from hers, and so on. They weren’t part of like, any kind of magical community or anything — I mean they had friends like them, but. It was just a part of life. At least that’s the way she made it sound. She came to the states when she was a kid. I only ever saw her use it at home, before she died.”

“I’m sorry.” Luisa nods, shrugs, gives a wistful smile as a signal to move on. Quentin scrapes his slides from the cutting board into the mixing bowl, begins to work on the next zucchini. “Where was she from?”

“Mexico,” Luisa says. “A lot of Latin American magic after colonization has developed as this really fascinating combination of European and indigenous or African influences.”

“Huh,” Quentin says, considering. “I didn’t know there were different — like, styles, or methods, or whatever.”

Luisa pauses with the door to the spice cabinet open to raise a wry eyebrow. “Did you think that people were practicing their Popper sequences in the Mayan empire? Or did you just think that magic was invented in Europe in the eighteenth century?”

“Honestly I never really thought about it either way,” he admits. “I didn’t know about magic at all until I got to Brakebills, and then once I was there it never really occurred to me to wonder about what there might be beyond that — I figured anything important, they’d teach me.”

“That’s kind of how they sell it, right?” Luisa says, rolling her eyes. “Sorry — I dated a Brakebills grad for a while, a couple years ago. It was not a great life choice. I might be a little biased.”

“No, you’re right, though,” he says. “They totally do act like — like they’re the be-all and end-all of what magic objectively is.” He thinks about Julia, complaining about trying to convince Fogg that cooperative magic should have a more prominent place in the curriculum. “So your mom’s spells, are they — like is it a different set of foundational patterns, or do they work differently, or —”

“Kind of?” She screws up her face like she’s looking for the words. “I mean — I’m casually interested in this stuff, but I’m _not_ an expert. But the way I think about it is, it’s like language, almost. Everywhere that humans lived, they had to solve this problem of communicating with each other. They had to find ways to name and describe the world around them. But language developed differently in different places, right? Different vocabularies, different grammars — differences about what matters enough to have its own word, about which concepts are linguistically connected to each other. In any language on earth you can talk, you can make jokes, you can lie, you can write poetry, you can give instructions. But — the best way to do those things is different, depending on the language you’re using. Different languages historically tend to favor different rhyme schemes, or metrical patterns — Homer was working with a totally different toolbox than Shakespeare. To me, magic is kind of like that.”

“Huh.” Quentin finishes the second zucchini, considering — the weight of this idea, and the fact that he never knew. “Was your dad born in Mexico too?”

“No,” Luisa says, “he’s from Puerto Rico — which, wow, you wanna talk fascinating magical hybrids, you should head up to the mountains there sometime, his family casts shit I can’t even begin to parse…. He and my mom met at Stanford.”

“So you’re like, what,” Quentin says, trying to wrap his head around it, “magically bilingual?”

“You should tell my dad that,” Luisa says. “Maybe then he’ll get off my back about how shitty my Spanish is.” Quentin laughs. “No, I wouldn’t go that far. I know the things I picked up from my mom, and I mean — you hang around hedges in Southern California, a decent amount of the stuff you learn has roots on the other side of the border. Two hundred years ago, this place _was_ the other side of the border, you know?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, although he — kind of didn’t know. Like, he knew, but hearing it her say it like that — “I guess I also never thought about magic being — impacted by like, geography, or culture, or — I don’t know, imperialism or whatever.”

“So you thought magic was unlike, uh —” Luisa taps her fingers on her chin in a parody of thoughtfulness. “Every other single thing in human history ever?”

“In my defense, I’m kind of an idiot,” Quentin says, and she laughs, and he laughs, too. He looks again at the fire on the burner, its steady magic glow indefinably different from the ones he’s lit and warmed his hands by, and thinks for some reason of the selkies, leaving their home and swimming until they found a place they could survive. A place they didn’t know existed, until they decided not to die.

*

“Ready?” Rishi says, glancing at Quentin.

Quentin gives a quick nod. They’re under the stairs that aren’t really there in the house that no longer exists in La Jolla, and the spiritual clamminess of the haunting is still pecking like Poe’s raven all along his spine, but he’s as ready as he’ll be. Holding each other’s gaze steady, they cast to set the scope of the pool. Quentin feels the magic rooting itself in him, extends his reach just slightly so Rishi can loosen his grip enough to work the more sophisticated elements of the spell.

The temperature cools, and Quentin hears: “Girls!”

“Now,” Rishi whispers, and they cast to light the place the fuck up with revelation.

“Wash your hands,” the woman starts, then — stops. Rishi bites his lip, watching in excitement; Quentin feels his own pulse quicken. “Wash your hands,” the woman repeats, uncertainly; “Wash —?”

Quentin’s concentrating on keeping the spell active and stable, but he can’t resist a glance up at her: she’s stepping forward in her house slippers, stepping back, stepping forward — peering at where the spell is percolating, a sheen to his own eyes like the distorting ripple of hot air. “Wash?” asks the ghost, again.

Footsteps running down the stairs above them; two girls in braids tumble forward at the bottom, stop. “My turn?” says the taller one, looking at the edge of the room; she frowns, shakes her head. “Your turn. My turn?”

“Your turn,” says the little one, slow and clear. “No — my turn. No — no one’s turn.”

“No one’s turn,” says the taller one.

“Oh god,” says the woman, stricken. “It’s happening. It’s happening again. He’s —”

“He’s coming,” says the older girl, panicking; “He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming —” The little one starts to cry.

Quentin steals a look at Rishi; this doesn’t seem like an improvement. But Rishi is in his own world, manipulating the spell as the scene progresses, face intent on observing the effects of his work.

“We have to — we have to,” says the woman, marching over to the girls and sheltering them with her body. “We have to go, but there’s —” She spins slowly around, surveying the room. “There’s nowhere?”

“There’s nowhere,” says the older girl.

“Nowhere,” echoes the youngest.

The front door creaks open without opening; both girls are crying. Heavy steps to the center of the room; the man with his briefcase and his pale face and his dread, looking at the spot the woman used to stand. “I’m done,” he says; Quentin looks down, telling himself to focus on the magic. And then the man says — “I’m done. I’m done. I’m done?” Like a broken record shifting pitch and speed.

“There’s nowhere,” says the woman. “Nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere.”

“There’s nothing,” says the man. In rhythm with the woman he starts to intone: “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

“This is nothing,” says the little girl. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

“So,” says the older girl, “so — so — so —”

“We don’t have to,” the woman says. The other voices stop; there’s a silence so severe Quentin looks up and is startled to see they’re still there. But they look different; they’re blurring at the edges, their colors fading sepia.

“We don’t have to,” the man whispers, nodding. Quentin realizes he’s holding his breath, tries to exhale as quietly as he can. Focus on the spell, he reminds himself; don’t fuck this up.

“I won’t,” says the little girl, half translucent already; “I won’t —” And she’s gone.

“She’s right,” says her sister, who seems now less like a sister and more like some inanimate creation; “She’s ri —” Gone, halfway through the word.

The man and the woman look at each other, fading; for a moment Quentin thinks some deep human understanding passes between them, but the impression passes and they appear somehow inert. They don’t say anything else; they nod, once, in uncanny unison, and then are gone; then the house is filled with a brilliant light against which Quentin has to shut his eyes; then he opens his eyes and they’re standing in an empty lot in the warm August evening, surrounded by the half-visible glimmer of their spell.

“Holy shit,” Quentin breathes amazed. He sets his hands in the closing position to lock out and glances at Rishi for confirmation. Rishi nods, practically glowing with excitement, which honestly he should be, because — “Holy _shit_ ,” Quentin repeats, a stunned laugh escaping him as they drop the pool. “You fucking did it.”

“So we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves,” Rishi says, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he takes out his meter and marks down some recordings in his laptop. “The residue sure as hell isn’t cleared, and permeable hauntings do this kind of shit all the time with no long-term effects, we’ll have to come back next week to check if it’s still gone — even if it were here but diminished or altered in some way that would be huge — but it might not be, this is a totally untested procedure, we shouldn’t — there’s really no guarantee we accomplished anything at all here except another entry in the long list of useless exorcism techniques, but —” His grin somehow expands even wider, teeth white under the streetlamps and the stars. “I mean, right now, if I had to bet, following my gut, I’d say — holy fucking shit, man.” He shakes his head like he can’t believe it. “That’s — I mean assuming there’s a payoff, that’s my fucking thesis topic, _done_ , like — funding guaranteed to come back out here next year, keep working at the residue if there is any, maybe apply it to other sites — this neighborhood has a bunch of weird ones — not to mention, post-exorcism analysis is like a completely new field and people are discovering totally novel phenomena at cleared sites all the time — _fuck!_ Fuck, man!” He takes his glasses off to steam them with his breath and wipe them clean with his shirt. “We might really have fucking done something new here today, Quentin.”

And Quentin — can barely speak, suddenly, caught up in his excitement and the buzz of the spell and the eerie sorry gratitude of the ghosts making their escape, in the bright light of possibility and the glimpse of letting go. “Yeah,” he manages, “we maybe did.”

*

It lingers, the excitement of that night. The feeling of being part of something good. Quentin feels energized by it, in a way he hasn’t for a long time, like he can start to fill his days with real things. He goes jogging even though it sucks and he lets himself feel a sense of accomplishment at the end, for doing it, and afterwards, in the kitchen, stoned but not like that stoned, eating toast and drinking coffee and feeling like he started his day off right. He hangs out on the porch with Rishi, watching the waves and asking about tentative plans for his thesis, and accompanies Luisa to some shitty punk band’s basement show because she thinks their bassist is hot, feeling out of place among the hair dye and ripped denim but not finding it in himself to care. He asks Cynthia to forge some proof of address so he can get a library card, and he doesn’t have the attention span yet to check anything out but on the walk back he considers if maybe he should get a bike.

He starts making his way through his list of potential hobbies, setting up the puzzle in a corner of his room for easy access when he doesn’t feel like doing anything, hoping it’ll help break his habit of wanting to go back to bed whenever he’s faced with a directionless moment. He runs through tracing drills for learning the optimal angle of a dip pen and squints at diagrams for folding various birds and replays video tutorials for basic guitar skills. It turns out calligraphy is insanely boring for something that makes writing a line such a fucking ordeal, the same initial clumsiness in his fingers that made mastering first-year tuts such an ordeal extends to techniques like a crisply symmetrical inside reverse fold, and he’s been maybe overly dismissive of guitar bros for his entire life, because even getting to the point of playing three chords in a way that sounds legitimately like music might actually involve hours of effort and not insignificant physical strain, and also he probably should have considered that he’s halfway to tone deaf before picking an instrument you regularly need to tune. But — what did Rishi say? That’s the fucking process. And maybe it is — the process that leads eventually to something called _okay_. It’s not like Quentin has the experience to know otherwise.

It’s a start.

*

On Friday the new coffee maker arrives, to general elation and praise; the next morning, while Ray brews the inaugural pot, Nico gives a sardonic eulogy for the defunct appliance it’s replacing, struggling through its final years of service and deserving a hard-earned retirement at last. Everyone applauds, enjoying the mood; Toni passes out mugs and Ray fills them with mock solemnity so they can all toast to the passing of old ways and the dawn of the new, the two of them sharing a look of fond amusement at the sarcastic energies of relative youth.

As Ray scoops up the old machine at last to deposit it in its final resting place, Quentin feels a twinge of regret and a stirring of curiosity and before he thinks better of it says, “Actually do you mind if I — keep that?” At Ray’s look of bemused skepticism, he clarifies, “Just — wanted to do some tinkering, playing around with a couple things I haven’t tried.”

“It’s not like anyone else wants it,” Ray says with a shrug, holding it out. Quentin takes it, balancing the weight on one wrist so he doesn’t have to put his coffee down, and Toni claps her fingertips together in a cheer for reducing waste.

Back in his room, Quentin sets the coffee maker at the desk, turning it over in his hands, surveying the outside from every angle. On a swift hopeful impulse he tries to cast Crabb's Restoration, the default first-try recommendation in a case like this, but — nothing happens. Obviously nothing happens, he thinks, swallowing back his disappointment. That magic is lost to him until he processes the incident that led to the break, and whatever the fuck that means, it probably involves being able to spend most if not all of your waking hours engaging with reality without the cotton-ball protection of low-level but constant drug use. So. Obviously he’s not there yet. That’s not why he brought it here.

Following a hunch, he spreads his hands on either side of the coffee maker, and this time he doesn’t cast; he just — reaches in. The way he would do before a mending, if mending were still something he could do: the part right before casting, where he figures out how the spell is going to go. And the worst part is that his hunch was right. He can still _read_ it: when he pushes his extrasensory awareness into the broken machine he can find the hitches, the jagged edges, the places that should be smooth and have gone rough, even the areas where someone else’s magic patchworked a solution until it caused a new problem. He can feel what he’s always felt, since before he knew how to give it a name: how it _wants_ — there’s no other word for it — to be whole. But he can’t help it get there, the way he would.

There’s a knock at the frame of the open door; Luisa’s poking her head in, and Quentin gestures to invite her in. She steps over to the desk, looking at the coffee maker. “So do you have a long-running interest in faulty household appliances?”

Quentin smiles. “My discipline —” he starts, then considers. “Is that some weird outdated Brakebills thing, too?”

“He’s learning!” Luisa says with exaggerated approval. “No, I think anyone who spent long enough at one of the schools has a discipline. Some hedges do too, and even the ones that don’t — kind of do, if they’ve stuck with magic long enough. I mean, there’s a reason Ray takes care of the garden and Toni deals with all the repairs.”

“So mine is Repair of Small Objects,” Quentin says. “Minor mendings, reconstructions, things like that. But I can’t, uh — I can’t do it anymore. Well any physical movement, really — levitations, suspensions, that kind of thing. Since —” Quentin is grateful even if he shouldn’t be to be explaining this through the gauze of the weed. “Julia thinks it’s because my ex is telekinetic, and things got kind of… fucked up there, before I left New York. Anyway — before all that, I would have been able to fix this in my sleep. But now…” He shakes his head. “I can _feel_ it, you know? I can see exactly what I would have done, and how it would have felt.”

“How would it have felt?” she asks.

His own words come back to him from the last time he answered that question: “Like I was waking it up, and helping it remember what it was before.”

Luisa smiles. “That’s lovely.”

“Yeah, kind of.” It stings a little, to remember: that sense of fitting-together, a rightness he almost knew. If there was something in his old life that had come close to the way he’d felt at the Seam, that might have been it, even if it happened in moments so small he didn’t realize it at the time. “I thought… well honestly I think a part of me hoped that it would turn out I’d be able to repair it by now. Like spending, I don’t know, two weeks at the level right above rock bottom was enough to… fix me, or something. Obviously that didn’t pan out, but — I thought I might be able to find a, I don’t know, like a workaround.”

“A workaround?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, thinking out loud as he starts to untangle the vague notion floating in the back of his head. “I mean — so the theory of minor mendings, it involves some binding, some memory work, but mostly it does rest on this idea of movement, and specifically of movement- _back_. At the core of pretty much every mending spell, there’s a focal point that orients your axes, and you hold that while you take the pieces and restore them to their proper place, relative to each other. That’s what locks it back together — the moment you’ve put it back the way it was, it can be permanently set. And I guess I’m trying to figure out if there’s another way to… make it whole again. But — “ He shakes his head. “How do you fix something if you can’t put the pieces back where they belong?”

“Oof,” Luisa says, blowing air up at her bangs. “I do not know.”

“Yeah, me neither.” Quentin gives the coffee maker one last glance, then turns to face her, setting aside the problem for another time. “So what’s your discipline?”

Luisa grins. “Aquamancy.” She holds her hands out, cupping the palms, and Quentin watches as the space between them fills up to the brim with water; then she folds them flat against each other, not dripping a single drop, and laces her hands together, index fingers steepled towards Quentin so she can — fucking _nail him in the forehead_ like a kid with a supersoaker.

“Oh very cute,” he says, wiping his face, but he’s laughing. It is pretty cool. “Did you learn that one at school? Or is that one of your mom’s?”

“The finger-gun thing is a hedge spell, as far as I know — built from the classical tradition for sure, but not exactly something you’ll find in the textbooks,” she says. “The other one, yeah, I got that from my mom. I think there’s a written equivalent somewhere, but I’ve never bothered to learn it.”

“Huh,” Quentin says, considering. “Could you — do you think you could teach me? Like, some of the spells you learned from your mom? Or do you have to be —” He stops, feeling awkward about how to ask what he’d started to ask.

Luisa raises an eyebrow. “Were you about to ask me if Mexican vernacular magic requires some kind of mystical blood connection, as opposed to the magic codified in the schools, which is neutral and universal?”

“Well,” Quentin says, “when you say it like that, it sounds idiotic, and very, um. Eurocentric.” That’s a word, right? “So — no, I definitely wasn’t.”

She rolls her eyes, but the gesture is amused. “Yeah, I can show you. Not now, I’ve got a fucking weekend shift at work to get to, but I showed Cynthia a couple tricks last year summer when she got curious. _Her_ parents, just for the record, are Jamaican and I’m pretty sure Dominican? But they’re not magicians, so her shit is totally academic — it really is all about what you’re used to.” Quentin nods in acknowledgement, embarrassed but only slightly. “But I can show you, when we’re both around. Although, it’s supposed to be stupid gorgeous this afternoon, you wanna meet me at the beach when I’m done?”

“Definitely,” Quentin says, and enjoys it: the plan and how easy it was to make it, the notion of looking forward to something he’s done before, and beyond that the promise of something he hasn’t, yet.

*

As soon as he walks up to the lot in La Jolla with Rishi, Quentin feels that something’s wrong. It’s too cold here; the hackles-raising jump seems as strong as it was before. Rishi seems to feel it, too: the exuberance he had the whole way over becomes visibly subdued and a slight frown appears on his face. He takes out his meter and does a few readings, brows drawing tighter together as he studies the measurements coming up. “It should be more different than it is,” he says finally, an edge of frustration in his voice. “But there still might — come on.”

The house, once they reveal it, looks the same; sitting under the stairs brings the same swell of dread. “This would be the last part to adjust,” Rishi says, as much to himself as to Quentin, “because it’s not animate. So — so we need to wait for the ghosts, before… I should get ready to take notes, see what modifications might have lingered.”

He opens his laptop and starts typing, maybe a little harder than he needs to from the sound of it, when they hear: “Girls!”

The woman looks the same; same dark knot of hair at the back of her neck, same polka-dot dress. “Wash your hands and come downstairs.” Quentin feels his heart sink, and he doesn’t know if it’s disappointment that the spell didn’t work or dread for what’s coming next.

“She and the father were the last to disappear,” Rishi whispers, increasingly desperate. “So maybe — the kids —”

Footsteps on the stairs; two little girls at the bottom. Rishi’s shoulders hunch over as the girls run to their mother, bickering about setting the table. And then —

“He’s the instigating incident, when you think about it,” Rishi says, “the foundation and the last to die. So it could be that —”

Wood creaking on the way from the door; “David,” says the woman; “Hi, Daddy,” say the girls; “What’s wrong?” says the woman, looking concerned.”

His awful voice: “I’m done. We’re ruined.”

“What happened?”

“There’s nothing.” Quentin swallows, feeling sick. “Nothing else I can —” His hand in his suit jacket; the glint of the pistol. Three steps forward; _Daddy, no_ —

It doesn’t send him sprinting from the house this time, but it’s still awful. Quentin watches the whole thing out of some inexplicable sense of duty. Like he owes it to this woman, these kids, dead before he was born. Like if they’re going to retread this hideous path over and over every week, they deserve to have a witness, now and again. Even though apparently it doesn’t matter after all if anyone sees.

“Fuck,” Rishi says when the bodies are lying in pools of blood, shutting his laptop. He sits with his head bowed in defeat for a moment, then stands to go as the loop starts back up — “Girls!” — walking past the woman without looking at her as she steps out of the kitchen. “Wash your hands…”

They walk back to the car in silence, the air between them heavy with dismay. Quentin can’t tell if he feels worse for the ghosts, freshly doomed even if they don’t know it, or for Rishi, staring down a thesis proposal he’ll be starting from scratch. “I’m sorry,” he says once they’re driving back.

“Thanks,” Rishi says tightly, eyes on the road. “I really thought — they _saw_ , they could _see_ that they were —” He doesn’t finish the sentence.

Quentin looks out the window, the city’s streetlights seeming woefully inadequate against the deepening darkness. “I did too.”

*

He’s running or he’s jogging or he’s trying to jog and his feet hurt and his legs hurt and it sucks. He’s been trying to do this for almost three weeks now and it’s not getting any less shitty. It’s hot out and he’s dripping sweat and he’s breathing in heaving irregular gasps and he knows Julia said he should probably slow down but he’s _already_ so slow that relaxed middle-aged joggers getting a couple miles in before work keep passing him easily and his whole body feels heavy and plodding and poorly made, like a whole other species from those lithe beings gliding through the air in their brightly colored sneakers, like it’s not just his brain that’s built wrong but the shambolic arrangement of meat and flesh housing too, and this — sucks, it sucks, why the fuck is he doing this?

And he tries, he does, to remind himself that he’s attempting not to die and he’s trying to fix his life and at some point that will require developing the behaviors of people with their shit together, of which this miserable exertion is a bewildering example, but then he gets passed by a tiny woman in like her fucking sixties who doesn’t even look like she’s breathing hard and he stops, hands on his knees, doubling over in exhaustion and humiliation, because there is no fucking point. Because he’s never going to get better at this and he’s never going to hate it any less and he’s never going to become one of these early morning cardio lovers, united by both their physical fitness and their expertise in devoting himself to meaningless things such as exercising and staying alive; he’s never going to fix his fucking life. Because all he’s doing is all he can do, and all he can do is work overtime to trick himself into believing temporarily that one day he might undergo a transformation profound enough that he’ll be a person capable of liking anything half as much as he loved dying, but when he actually surveys the hypothetical years ahead of him, years of trying and pretending and fucking up and fucking up and fucking up and goddamn jogging — the same pathetic patterns looping unchangeably and every time feeling new — of course he doesn’t want that. He wants what he had, and isn’t allowed anymore: the bliss of knowing he was doing it right. Isn’t that what he always wanted — isn’t that why he cast at the Seam, isn’t that what drove him to Blackspire, the offering he sold as a noble sacrifice but was always a way of getting exactly what he’d craved his whole life — god, how long has he been trying to achieve the impossible — the promise of a world where he couldn’t fuck up any longer.… And if he can’t have that —

He walks into a convenience store, the air conditioning cold on his sweat-damp skin, and picks up a six-pack to take to the register. Then he thinks better of it and picks up a second one, too.

*

He knows what he’s doing: he knows he’s crossing a threshold from self-medicating to run from his feelings into hurling himself into the familiar abyss of feeling like shit. He knows this is the dance he’s been doing his whole life, between hiding and self-destructing, ignoring reality until the only option is to sink into it like swan-diving onto a pile of rocks. He knows that it’s insane and immature to set the options for his life to _flawless_ and _unbearable_ , that most people develop an ability to weather distress without succumbing to despair, that the only reason he hasn’t is because on some level he doesn’t want to. He knows this is the logic the people at the meetings talk about having forced themselves to discard — if nothing is as easy as the thing that nearly killed you, then it’s not worth giving that up — and he may or may not be an alcoholic but he thinks that dying can be kind of like a drug: the dream of frictionless perfection that turns the mundane tribulations of the waking world into fathomless horrors by comparison. He knows he’s a coward to stand so paralyzed in the face of these phantoms, and he hates himself for it but not enough to change.

He knows with revolting clarity when he introduces himself to a girl in a hedge bar in University Heights, it’s the same as any addict looking for another hit, another dose of the thing that stopped being fun long ago but can still blunt the harshest edges of reality for a few hours at a time; he knows when he fucks her he’s looking for the salve to his ego and the distraction in his body and just as much for the shame afterwards, the disgust at his body and all the things he’s let it do that feels like the only sensation he still deserves. He knows this is just the latest spin in his lifelong quest to punish himself for staying alive, a new variant on staying up all night not writing the paper due at eight in the morning and picking fights with his dad until he felt like he’d gotten proof they both knew Quentin had ruined his life.

He knows. He knows. He can’t stop knowing. And he can’t stop doing it, because knowing doesn’t mean shit. He can watch himself walk the path he’s walked a hundred times, predicting every step and understanding he’s the only thing keeping himself trapped, but he can’t break the loop. No matter how clearly he sees.

*

In his bedroom with the lights off and the blinds drawn he sits on the floor leaning against the bed drinking wine and listening to Bright Eyes and thinking about the Seam. The mended mirror showing him what he’d always wanted to see, the pieces coming together to reveal a way out. The secret door he finally unlocked and he thinks about Blackspire before that, another thwarted escape. What he’d said to Alice, before, his smug words taunting him as the shame of his hypocrisy burns in his ears — _People make mistakes so they can change_ — But he hadn’t wanted to do either. The decision he’d made intoxicated on the illusion of righteousness, his fury the instant Eliot had snatched his locked-down future away from. How he’d hated Eliot in that moment, really hated him, for how he’d kept them apart and yet refused still to admit that for Quentin, this was the best he could ever hope for: eternity stretching ahead of him dull and cloistered and perfectly safe. Safe as a fucking mental institution, all strings and sharp angles and blunt objects removed. He thinks about the mind-web first year, about his oldest nightmare made manifest and about fucking Ellis Wirth-Downs, the stain of his perennial fantasizing, his way out presented to him by a little girl from a story he’d loved too long written by a monster. The terror of the Madness Maker which was only the terror of his own reflection: _The real curse was, he only played when he could win, which cut him off from the surprise, horror, sadness, and wonder of life_ … The oblivion of perfection; the eternal high of never again being uncertain or wrong. He thinks about the real hospital, the first time and the second time and all the times after, the white lights and the quiet group activities and his father’s too-gentle smile visiting and and his secret vows and how ashamed his sixteen-year-old self would be to realize all along his fears were right and he never would quite start living for real. He would only ever find new ways to play at it until his latest delusions hit their expiration date and his life again went up in smoke.

_The mask I polish in the evening, in the morning looks like shit..._

In the mornings he stares at his reflection and it feels like looking at a ghost: something trapped in the illusion of what it’s like to live. Something that thinks it has a future, when it’s only stuck repeating an ugly story from the past.

*

He gets as far as pulling Alice’s number up in his phone before some inexplicable mercy talks him out of calling. He said he wouldn’t pull that shit anymore; he’s beyond caring about his own integrity, but she doesn’t deserve to deal with his bullshit like this. But he wakes up still thinking about her and decides to call anyway, before his day dissolves, because he thinks she might deserve to hear what he wants to tell her, this time.

“Hello?” she says, quiet and uncertain.

It takes Quentin a moment to answer; he’d half been hoping for her voice mail. “Hey,” he says, voice croaking. “I just — I know I’ve already apologized to you, and you probably don’t want to hear it again, but, um. I have a lot to be sorry for, and —” He stops, chewing at his bottom lip. Wondering if all he’s doing is finding another bullshit way to reassure himself he’s not that bad. But he already called, and she’s waiting for him to finish, so he goes on. “I’m sorry about — about how I was to you, after Blackspire. About —” A bitter laugh escapes him. “I was so pissed, you know, that you fucking — betrayed us or whatever, betrayed magic, who gives a shit, when really you just — you just wanted to be sure. And I — I get that. Of course I fucking get that. The idea that I would ever act like I of all people didn’t, like I was somehow above you or had any right to…. Anyway. I just — I’m really fucking sorry about that. And I wanted you to know.”

“Oh,” Alice says. “Well — thanks for saying it, I guess.”

“Yeah,” he says. He should say something else, but he doesn’t have it in him to be anything other than sorry.

“I don’t —” she starts. “I mean, you were right. You were kind of an asshole about it, but you were right.”

It feels worse, to hear that. “Maybe,” he says. “But I still shouldn’t have —”

“I just mean — I just meant that later, when I was trying to… to figure shit out, to move on somehow… it helped. To remember what you’d said, and what you’d done.”

“I’m glad,” he somehow manages. “Are you — you’re okay? Now? Like, mostly?”

“I am, actually,” she says. Her little smile, flickering outward like she was scared of believing it might stay. “What about you? Are you doing — okay, or better these days, Q?”

“I am,” he lies. He doesn’t want her to worry. He wants her to be happy; he’s always wanted that. “I should go, but, uh — I’m glad — I’m really glad you’re doing well. You deserve that.”

“So do you,” she says, softly sincere. His throat tightens. He hangs up without saying goodbye.

*

He remembers what Eliot said, the last time they talked which might turn out to be the last time they ever talk: how he’d gone back to whatever central trauma and unlocked the door the moment he could see that he’d had a choice. Well. Good for fucking Eliot, but Quentin knows he has a choice, knows he’s had choices all along; knows he’s choosing to be what he is with every drink and every day spent in darkness and every eager touch from someone who has no idea who they’re really fucking. That’s the worst part, actually: that he’s done every bit of this on purpose because there’s something dark and broken inside him that he’s never been strong or brave or good enough to cast out.

In the mirror his reflection says _This is what you wanted_ and Quentin can only think _I know, I know, I know_.

*

“Quentin. Wake up.”

He is dreaming, he thinks. His head hurts and his mouth tastes like someone hid a dead body behind his tonsils and he is dreaming because there’s a voice talking to him but he’s very successfully steered his life to a position where no one would want to talk to him, ergo: dream. Random neurons firing, tricking him into witnessing the day. He won’t fall for it, though. He’s too smart for their lies.

“Come on, man. Let’s go, it’s time. Up up up up up.”

Against his every wish and better judgment Quentin pries his eyes open. A horrible idea. He opens his mouth next, intending to ask a question but succeeding only in making a sound like: “ _Fneah?_ ”

Rishi — what the hell is Rishi doing here? — Rishi is pacing back and forth in Quentin’s bedroom, vibrating with excitement. “Good, you’re up.”

“You woke me up,” Quentin says accusingly, although that feels at best half true.

“Yeah,” Rishi agrees, as though this is civilized behavior, “because I need you. Look, I’m not an asshole, okay, I brought fucking caffeine, Advil, fluids, electrolytes, simple carbs —” Belatedly Quentin registers that he’s gesturing towards the nightstand, on which there is in fact a mug of coffee, two red-brown pills, a cartoonishly large bottle of bright red Gatorade, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That’s — why? What is — ? “So, you know, whatever order you wanna tackle that in, get started, because the clock is ticking, we’ve gotta get onsite.”

“What is,” Quentin starts, loses track of what he’s saying. With an arm that feels like cement he reaches for the Advil and drinks it with the Gatorade, narrowly managing not to gag before he sets his head back down. “Why are,” he tries again, and finally settles on: “I thought you went back to Sacramento.”

“I did,” Rishi says. He is speaking so, so loudly. “And you missed my goodbye dinner, so, you know, fuck you, by the way.”

Quentin winces, torn between genuine regret and wanting him to go away. “Sorry about that.”

Rishi waves this off. “It’s fine, you’re obviously going through some kind of gigantic emotional breakdown, I’m a sixth-year grad student, I get it. But. You gotta hit the pause button on your nervous collapse, man. I hate to do that to you, normally I respect the hell out of someone else’s existential crisis, but this is my thesis we’re talking about, and I have to be on campus for a pre-semester pedagogy seminar September first, so it’s now or fucking never and we’ve got just under four hours to get set with these modifications to the spell, capisce? Chop fucking chop. You can climb right back into the depression cave when you’re done, I promise. I won’t even ask you to come along for the follow-up.”

“Five hours to…” Quentin frowns, confused. “But I thought — it didn’t work. You said you had to start over.”

Rishi stops pacing to look at him. He’s beaming with a slightly manic spark in his eyes. “I was wrong.”

This is too much to follow at the delicate hour of — Quentin checks his phone — three-thirty in the afternoon. “About the spell?”

“About everything, the whole idea, I had it totally fucking wrong,” Rishi says. He sounds bizarrely thrilled about this. “Look, I’ll explain on the way over, okay, but right now I need you to get your ass out of bed and into whatever it takes for you to pull it together enough to learn this, because no one’s gonna be able to get the whole thing from scratch this fast. Are you with me, or are you, not to put too fine a point on it, going to screw me the fuck over with regards to my _entire_ career for the sake of spending an extra five hours of your life in bed?”

Ugh. “Well,” Quentin grumbles, resigned, “when you say it like that...” Gingerly he pushes himself upright and reaches for the coffee.

Rishi lets out an ear-splitting woop. “ _Fuck_ yes, okay, it’s happening, knew I could count on you. This is going to be good, man, I can feel it.”

And Quentin doesn’t really believe that’s possible, but he’s hungover and annoyed so he drinks some coffee and takes a bite of the sandwich and says through a mouthful of PBJ, “It fucking better be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content note** : The scene beginning "In La Jolla..." features Magicians-style ghosts, reenacting a murder-suicide in which a man shot his wife, two children, and himself. This is described non-graphically, but there is a brief mention of blood. The ghost-scene recurs in this chapter and the next, but the first instance is the longest and most detailed as far as the violence is concerned. This entire series has obviously had a lot of content around problematic uses of alcohol, but the first half or so of this chapter engages with those perhaps more explicitly than the story has so far. As a disclaimer, I certainly hope this goes without saying, but just in case — I am writing fanfiction about Quentin Coldwater from SYFY's _The Magicians_ trying to get his life together, **not** a text which is intended in any way to be remotely instructive or informational about alcoholism or other addiction-related topics, and my goal is always to express something that feels true to the perspectives of the characters involved, not to express my own opinions or beliefs and definitely not to provide any kind of model for correct thinking or behavior, which _Magicians_ fanfiction would sure be a funny place to look for.
> 
> Quentin vaguely recalls having seen [this _Atlantic_ article](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/are-you-almost-alcoholic-taking-a-new-look-at-an-old-problem/254585/) and [this _New Yorker_ piece](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/05/11/brain-games). He did not finish reading either of them.


	3. Chapter 3

From the driver’s seat Rishi says, “It’s not the seeing, it’s the doing.”

Quentin feels like this should mean something to him, but several cups of coffee later it’s still taking a lot of effort to focus and his head is full of the spell modifications he’s spent the past two hours learning. “The what?”

“I had it all wrong,” Rishi says, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “I went back to my original inspiration, this concept of mirror therapy, and I was thinking about it in completely the wrong way. It’s not looking at the mirror with the illusion of the amputated limb that changes things — it’s _movement_. It’s moving the part of the body you still have, and moving it over and over, and — yes, and also _watching_ the movements — they think it tricks the brain into thinking it still has an arm or whatever there to unclench, or — the mechanism’s not wholly understood — but the point is, just looking, just seeing, that doesn’t do anything. It’s the action — because the brain is plastic, right, it changes and moves in response to stimuli, and those can be external stimuli but they can also be _what you do_ — it’s the doing. That’s the part that creates a shift, that makes it possible for the brain to — move on.” He glances at Quentin. “Does that make sense?”

It does not, but that seems rude to say. Anyway he doesn’t really need it to make sense; he just needs to run the tuts and channel the flow. “So the new spell…?"

“Right, right,” Rishi says. “You’re on point for a lot more of the pool — it requires some real-time adjusting, but I think you’ll be fine.” Quentin is not reassured. “Ideally I’d have been able to set it to be self-sustaining for the expected duration but that’ll take me a couple weeks to crack, if it’s even doable. But I needed it to run as independently of me as possible, because I’m going to be taking a more dynamic role in the process.”

“What are you going to do?” Quentin asks.

Rishi grins. “I’m going to make like a doctor and fucking operate.”

*

“Girls! Wash your hands and come downstairs.”

Footsteps on the stairs; long brown braids at the bottom. Two little girls bickering over silverware while their mother looks on. Rishi looks at Quentin. “You ready?” Quentin nods, going over the new index sequence once more in his head, and Rishi says, “Okay. On my signal.”

The foreboding weight of the steps from the door; the man with his briefcase and his suit jacket. The woman asking _What’s wrong_ , the man’s hollowed out _I’m done, we’re ruined_ —

“Now,” Rishi whispers, and quickly they cast.

Quentin feels immediately the new weight of the pool; it startles him enough that he has to close his eyes for a moment to concentrate on rebalancing the flow in a way he can sustain. When he opens them Rishi is looking at him with concern, and he tells him, “I’m good, it’s fine.”

Rishi nods, then turns back to the scene at hand, veering towards its brutal climax. Three steps forward; _Daddy, no —_

— and then a stutter goes through all of them, a swift but severe halt like a frozen video, and the ghosts look around, peering alternately at each other and into the revealing summer of the web.

“Daddy, no?” says one of the girls. The other joins her, repeating: “Daddy, no — Daddy, no — Daddy, no —”

“This isn’t,” says the woman. “David, this isn’t —”

“There’s nothing,” says the man, hushed. “There’s nothing — nothing — nothing —”

Rishi bounds out from their hiding place beneath the stairs. “Hi — hey everyone, hello.”

Quentin holds his breath. This is the most speculative part of the idea, Rishi told him; other revelation spells with other forms of apparitions have been shown to temporarily increase permeability, but there’s no evidence yet of a Taniyama Pool working in that manner for this type of haunting. For a moment the ghosts frown and glance from side to side, as if they can hear a voice but can’t see where it’s coming from; then something seems to settle in them and they turn to look at him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman says pleasantly. “No hablo Español.”

“Okay, we don’t have time to unpack that,” Rishi mutters to himself. To the ghosts he says, “Me neither, actually. Uh, my name is Rishi, I’m a hauntologist — I study ghosts, which you — look, before we go on, you can all see me, right?”

“We can see you,” says the man. Then he frowns. “But we’re — _we_ is not —”

“We’re not we,” the little girls say in unison.

“ _Yes_ ,” Rishi says, pointing at them for emphasis. “Yes, you — you’re all dead — sorry, that was probably a little blunt —”

“But it’s true,” murmurs the woman, eyes downcast as though she’s examining herself. “We are — we have been —” She stares the pool at the edge of the group; Quentin shifts it to concentrate slightly in the area across from her. “My god. My god. How long? How many times? How many years?”

“All this time,” the taller girl whispers, sounding awed. “And we could just —” She lifts up her hand in front of her face and it starts to fade into translucence. Every time Quentin thinks he’s seen the weirdest fucking thing he’s ever seen something comes along to top it.

“ _Wait_ ,” Rishi says. “Because — yes, you’re right, you could just — shit, I don’t know. Vanish, or scatter, or — honestly, you guys, what happens to ghosts when they stop being ghosts is still a _huge_ mystery to us — anyway, but actually you can’t. We tried that last week —”

“You did?” the man says, frowning.

“Yeah, and — well obviously it didn’t work,” Rishi says, with a bit of a laugh, “because, ah, here we all are, right? But I’ve got another idea, if you — I need you to work with me, okay? And it’s not — I don’t know if this will work, but I think it might, or it might at least help, and if not — worst case scenario you forget I was ever here, so — can you give it a try?”

The ghosts look at each other. Quentin doesn’t know if they feel bound to each other as fellow phantoms, or if it’s some lingering echo of family loyalty even through the violence of their ends, but he finds it weirdly moving. “Yes,” the woman says, and it’s like right before they disappeared — her voice sounds the same, but there’s something less than human about it. “We can try.”

“ _Awesome_.” Rishi does a quick fist-pump — it’s kind of cute, honestly — and then he gets to work.

They’re there for hours; Quentin had thought Rishi was being dramatic by packing him a protein bar, but he’s grateful for its half-artificial sweetness halfway through the night. Rishi works the ghosts like some unholy Catholic priest running the world’s weirdest game of Simon Says, taking them through a wide array of alternative movements: arbitrary physical gestures, familiar scenes from the lives of the people who left them there, variations on their death sequence with the motions exaggerated or reversed, turned into operatic melodrama or slapstick comedy. The whole time he reminds them by turns to keep looking and keep moving. “Don’t go with what seems real or automatic,” he says again and again. “Keep moving, keep alert. It’s the action that will set you free.” As Quentin watches, he’s struck by how the longer they move, the more human they seem, starting eventually to laugh and improvise. Like by replaying the patterns of life, they’re overwriting the death that locked them here. It fills him with — he doesn’t know what. Something warm and sharp, sorrow laced with an inarticulable yearning.

Eventually the ghosts are dim and crackling around the edges, losing the ability for speech. “Did it — did — did it work,” says the little girl. “Did it work.”

“We’ll find out next week, I guess,” Rishi says.

It’s unclear whether she heard him. She looks up at him with eerie, too dark eyes, and intones, “You saved us. You — us. You saved us.”

“Honestly,” Rishi says, “if this works at all, you guys are the ones that saved my ass.” He smiles kindly at her while she vanishes, a gesture that seems sweeter somehow for the fact that she almost definitely won’t remember that; without ceremony the others are gone, as though it was only their wholeness as a unit that had kept them tethered here this long.

Rishi wipes his forehead and gives Quentin a thumbs up; Quentin closes out the spell, his exhaustion crashing over him as soon as he doesn’t have that to distract him. “So? Was that what you were hoping for?”

“Maybe,” Rishi says. His eyes are wide and bright, but he’s keeping his face neutral. “Maybe, I mean — I didn’t have a ton of time to think this through. That was a lot of — throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping some of it sticks. And if any of it does stick, I mean — I’m not expecting to come back here and have it be emptied out. It would probably retain some of its core characteristics, even if this worked. But — I’ll find out next week, I guess.”

Quentin hesitates for a moment before saying, “You mean, _we’ll_ find out next week.”

Rishi raises an eyebrow. “And here I thought you had an ongoing psychological collapse to get back to.”

And like — he does, doesn’t he? Nothing that hurt yesterday hurts any less now; every fuck-up tattooed under his skin and every failure inlaid deep as his spinal fluid is still there, ready to burn him alive as soon as he shuts his eyes. The future seems as closed and lifeless as it ever did. Despite Rishi’s cautious optimism, he can’t even really bring himself to believe their hours of exertion have had any lasting effect. But somehow — Quentin looks around at the house that isn’t there: the thick carpet, the smooth floors, bloodless and clean. The cold air lingering, the last reminder of the ghosts with their sorry dance, acting out a memory no one should have to relive. The ghosts that would still be here, dying and dying and dying until the dawn, if Rishi hadn’t dragged him out of bed so they could come back. If he hadn’t decided to try again. “I think I might be able to carve some time out of my busy schedule,” he says, and Rishi gives him a lopsided smile.

*

He really is planning to resume his chemically-supported catatonia while waiting out the week before he’ll see this thing through, but that lifestyle is less appealing viewed from even slightly outside its borders, like he was on his way to drowning and remembered what it felt like to breathe. Or it seems less inevitable once someone’s made him do something else. Or he just feels like kind of a dipshit retreating to his bed to feel sorry for himself like self-pity is his full-time job when Rishi watched his dream collapse and pulled it together a week later to make another attempt. Probably “don’t die” would be a healthier motivation than “don’t be a dipshit,” but. Quentin’s working with what he’s got.

It’s not like he throws himself into Making Great Choices, but he feels compelled to keep things — passable. Acceptably Non-Dipshit. He keeps drinking, like a lot, but also like less than he had been, and mostly in the evenings, which he manages to spend in the house, going to sleep alone instead of trying to lose himself in someone else’s bed. He rewatches _Firefly_ with Rishi, even though he’s seen it like a million times and Joss Whedon’s whole sexy waif kink grosses him out more than it did when he was sixteen, because Rishi for his part is radiating a dementedly cheerful anxiety out of his pores every waking second, and Quentin figures they can be each other’s distraction through the next couple days. He picks up when Julia calls and in the absence of anything more interesting to share winds up telling her about the ghosts and the project; she loves the whole concept, of course, and he gets to hear her think out loud through the theory of the spell and the implications of its potential success. Quentin promises to ask for a couple references he can pass on for further reading, and manages to keep that promise. After he sends Julia the email, he realizes he can’t remember the last time that happened. It’s a tiny thing, but — it’s a start.

On a cloudy morning he takes a long walk on the beach, wondering if he’ll spot Edine or any of the other selkies working magic in their thick skins beneath the waves. He doesn’t, but he doesn’t walk his dumb ass into the fucking ocean either. At this point, that might count as a win.

*

At the house that’s not a house in La Jolla, Quentin and Rishi wait for the evening’s first loop to begin.

“Even if nothing changes,” Rishi says, “that doesn’t mean — I mean, it’s all data. It’s part of the process.”

“Right,” Quentin agrees. “And you’ve already got a new finding about thinning the barrier on certain kinds of impermeable loops. That alone is an opening for further research.”

“Right,” Rishi says, mouth tense. He doesn’t seem reassured. They’ve had this conversation maybe six times in the past forty-eight hours, including twice in the car on the way over. Quentin can’t blame him for his nerves. Of course he wants to know it’s possible to do what he set out to do, not just some interesting side effect. And of course he hopes he’s done it. Despite his own pessimism, Quentin has found himself getting caught up too in wanting to know it’s worked — to know they did something real.

“Girls! Wash your hands and come downstairs.”

Footsteps down the stairs; children’s voices at the bottom, long braids swinging. Quentin’s stomach tightens. The same instructions to set the table; the same arguments about the silverware. The same door that’s not a door opening, the same croaking apparition. 

Rishi hangs his head in palpable defeat. “Fuck,” he says, voice rough, taking off his glasses to dig the heels of his hands into his eyes. “ _Fuck_. I really thought…”

_David — Hi, Daddy..._

Quentin aches — for Rishi’s thesis and his poor dead sister, for his parents hoping that their magician son might find a way to end that awful echo on the Jersey coast, for the ghosts about to reenact their brutality once again. For his own idiot heart, too weak to hope yet somehow not smart enough after all his unjustified disappointments to have learned to guard itself against this kind of predictable strike.

_What’s wrong? — I’m done. We’re ruined —_

He keeps watching, still compelled by a sense of obligation to the ghosts who don’t know he’s there. “There’s nothing,” says the man; “Nothing else I can —” The hand reaching into his suit jacket; the pistol emerging outside it, held up high. Two steps forward; _Daddy, no —_

Wait. _Two_ steps?

“Rishi,” Quentin says, elbowing him when he doesn’t respond. “Hey, I think you should watch —”

— the glint of the light on the pistol; _David, David, David_ ; little feet running and the thunderclap gunshot and Quentin feels queasy watching the tiny body’s ragdoll drop, like he must have made a mistake because he wanted too badly to believe, his runaway savior complex tricking him again, only then he notices — “Look,” he breathes, “are you seeing —”

“There’s no blood,” Rishi says, amazed.

Not a drop: there’s one dead body, then another and another and another, but though they fall with the same hideous finality and crash with the same nauseating thud and display the same discolorations and injuries — there’s no blood spreading ugly red on the floor. “Is that,” Quentin says, “I mean it’s not — it’s not _them_ , but is it —”

“Ghosts are all energy,” Rishi says, “everything here _is_ them, it’s all one — shit, I gotta take notes —” He takes out his laptop, eyes intent on the scene, typing wildly as the corpses in the center of the room flicker and are gone and seconds later they hear _Girls! Wash your hands…_

They stay for one more loop to get the details, then a second so Rishi can double-check. Quentin can’t believe how much those two-not-three steps mean to him; his heart swells, every time, even amid the ongoing horror. Outside far enough on the sidewalk that the lot looks like a lot again, they break into a run till they hit the spot where they parked. Only then, like he was afraid of waking himself up from a dream before, does Rishi let out an exuberant “ _Fuck_ yes,” smiling like he’s about to burst with it. “You saw that, right? You were there? An impermeable loop fucking _decades_ old, dozens of reports written each _year_ by first-year students learning to take choreo notes, modified beyond the date of the intervention? That was real?”

“I saw that,” Quentin says, feeling himself start to smile in the glow of Rishi’s contagious excitement, “and — yeah, dude. That was real. You fucking did it.”

“Can’t believe I’m a genius,” Rishi says, and Quentin laughs. “I’m — god, though, Quentin, _we_ fucking did it, I would have been so boned without you, I should —” He shook his head, opening the car door. “Come on, man, this calls for a drink. We gotta celebrate, let’s go, I’m fucking buying.”

*

“J. J. Abrams is a hack,” Rishi says, “but I would let Zachary Quinto do literally anything to me.”

“Mm,” Quentin says, agreeing. They’d dropped the car off at the house and headed back out to the hedge bar nearby, giddy with their victory and the miracle of the magic and the hope of more to come. Rishi talked a mile a minute about methodological considerations for his thesis and implications for the field and directions for future research, and Quentin listened, caught along in the thrill. Somehow the conversation had turned after a few rounds to the intellectually infuriating but for both of them undeniably sexually formative _Star Trek_ reboot, and it had seemed suddenly like a brilliant idea to stumble back to the house and watch it on Quentin’s laptop, sitting here on the floor, leaning back against his bed.

“Not, like, unhygienic shit, a man’s gotta draw a line,” Rishi goes on. “But embarrassing, absolutely. Degrading, probably. Furry shit? I’m not proud, but — yeah. Yeah, I think so. For ZQ.”

“He is insanely hot,” Quentin says. “You know, my friend Julia always said she’d take Chris Pine over him.”

“I can’t believe it,” Rishi murmurs.

Quentin scoffs. “I know, right?”

But Rishi’s not thinking about Chris Pine, apparently. “It really happened,” he says. He’s said this repeatedly throughout the evening. Each time sounds as freshly wonderstruck as the first. “I mean, I had this idea, and my advisor liked it, it’s not like she told me I was being crazy, and the meta-math was, not to brag, tight as hell, but — I don’t know, it’s like I wanted it to be real so badly that I still can’t process it actually fucking worked. That I can actually — do this, that it’s possible, and I can keep working on — maybe one day —” A silence, sad and hopeful and humbling. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Quentin shrugs this off. “It’s your spell. And you ran all the hard parts. Any half-decent magician could have done my side.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one that did,” Rishi says. “You’re the one who volunteered, and learned it, and figured out the new version last-minute, and maybe I could have found someone else, but — maybe not, you know? So — from where I’m standing, it looks a lot like you really saved my ass.”

On the screen, Chris Pine stumbles onto Leonard Nimoy, a relic of the past here to tell a story about the future. Quentin is tipsy and tired and objectively still a total fucking mess, but he feels — awake, somehow. “Honestly?” He takes it all in: the dumb hot movie and the stupid laughter across cheap drinks and the electricity of the evening, crackling in the air still, the high of having witnessed something happening that was new and good and true. The two-not-three steps forward, the tiniest shifts that don’t change anything but prove change is possible. “From where _I’m_ standing, it feels kind of like you’re the one who might have saved mine.”

Rishi turns to him, smiling his crooked smile. “Well. Thanks, either way.” He has nice eyes. Bright and sweet, with long lashes.

“Yeah,” Quentin says softly. “You, too.”

There’s a silence between them, holding each other’s gaze. An instant where it feels like their stillness has lasted just slightly too long to be accidental, where the ionic charge of the air seems indescribably to shift. Like a moment that was just a moment has now become a prelude. Like they’re about to — but no, Quentin thinks uncertainly; no, that’s not — that’s not what this is. He’s not doing that. So —

— only then Rishi leans in and kisses him, so maybe this — _is_ that? Is — well and like it’s good, it feels good, Quentin knows how to do this, and Rishi is leaving in the morning, he has to be on campus by Tuesday for that seminar, and so — that’s fine, right? Yeah. Yes. It doesn’t matter if he knows — it doesn’t matter what he knows. They’re making out, they’ve found a rhythm, Rishi has one hand at the side of Quentin’s face and one splayed out along his ribs, eager yet polite, and those are good things to be, for sex, objectively, so — Rishi breaks the kiss to lean his forehead against Quentin’s, breathe a little laugh, and Quentin laughs back because that’s what you do. It’s sweet, it looks sweet. He has lovely eyes, big and dark. Lovely eyes and his funny long fingers, more enticing than you’d think with those knobby knuckles. Quentin — can want this. Even though he still, he’s never been sure whether Rishi — he can just let himself, even if it’s only pretending —

Without saying anything, Rishi springs to his feet and offers a hand down, crooked smile a little closer to a smirk now but eyes kind of abashed, like, _man, get a load of this_. Looking at him like — like you’d look at a person you’re trying to sleep with, right? There’s nothing else there? Quentin doesn’t think — he takes his hand, appreciating the strength of his grip as Rishi helps him up. He’s a little unbalanced once upright, tipping forward, and Rishi steadies him with hands on his shoulders, letting them drift down as the two of them laugh again before they resume kissing. Kissing, and kissing, and the softness of Rishi’s hair to the touch, and the familiar geometry of arms searching, seeking — this is all, it’s fine. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter who Rishi thinks he’s kissing. Quentin can’t get out of his head but that’s just because barely past the crest of three drinks across the night is still the soberest he’s done this in a while, probably — since coming to California for sure — since leaving New York, really — or actually even before that, god, all his blurred memories of those last ever months with Alice — so really since — this is the closest to sober he’s had actual sex since —

— Rishi slips a hand beneath his shirt, a soft and patient question of skin on just the smallest patch of skin, and Quentin —

— freezes inside himself, a panicking clamminess shooting beneath his skin. His brain says _stop_ and his body says _stop_ and his body and his brain have been screaming at him to _stop_ for months and he’s gotten very good at ignoring them because he’s wanted to ignore them and he’s wanted to ignore them because ignoring them is a distraction from how he wants to die and he knows all this, it isn’t news, he knows and knowing hasn’t mattered because most of him still wants to die, but —

— but somewhere in the abyss of his self is also a room that isn’t a room in a house that isn’t a house where bodies are falling without any blood. A cycle no longer unbroken, a locked door wedged just barely open, because they realized there was a choice. And because — because when they saw the choice, they made a different one. Over and over, until something inside them changed.

He doesn’t have to do this.

“Wait — stop,” Quentin hears his voice his saying; “I’m sorry, I — I need to stop,” he says. He steps back, trying to calm down. His hands are shaking.

“Shit, I’m sorry, man,” Rishi is saying, “I thought —”

“No, it’s fine, it’s —” Quentin croaks an incredulous laugh. “It literally is not you, it’s me, I just — I just need a minute, can I just have a minute?”

“Of course.” Rishi’s face and voice are matched in soft concern, which is — correct, probably, but not helpful. Quentin sits on the bed and rests his face in his hands, closing his eyes. His heart is pounding like crazy, he notices; he takes some deep breaths, willing it to slow down.

When his pulse is back to normal Quentin says, “You didn’t — do anything wrong, or misread anything, or — whatever. I just, uh —”

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” Rishi hurries to reassure him.

“I think I kind of do,” Quentin says, “not — like just for me, just to…” He lifts his head to stare at the floor, trying to organize the meteoric impulses shooting through his brain into something like thoughts. He couldn’t get out of his head, he remembers; he couldn’t stop thinking that this was the closest he’d been to sober for this since he died at the fucking Seam. He couldn’t stop wondering again if Rishi knew, and he tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, but it did, because —

— because maybe Quentin hadn’t been following the same suffocating pattern he’s long since worn deep grooves in, but maybe he had been. And it matters, actually, because it turns out maybe he doesn’t want to keep doing what he’s done before just because it’s what he’s used to. It turns out maybe he has a choice, and he wants to choose something new.

“This is going to sound nuts,” Quentin says, “but I just — I just need to like, see what exactly it is that I’m actually doing, so I can know if — do you know who I am?” He cringes. “Okay, that came out — insanely grandiose, I didn’t mean it like — like have you, have you heard anything about me from — I don’t know, the fucking magician grapevine, or the others here, or —”

“Is this about the stuff with the Seam?” Rishi asks uncertainly.

Fuck. It was the obvious answer, but it’s still a blow Quentin feels deep in his chest. “So you did know.”

Rishi shrugs. “I asked Nico about it, my first week here, just to check, but — you’re not exactly in the top ten baby names, you know?”

Quentin nods, extending this awareness retroactively, feeling half queasy. “You never said anything to me.” He doesn’t mean it to come out accusatory, but it does, a bit.

Looking uncomfortable, Rishi says, “Was I supposed to?”

Quentin shakes his head. “Not — no, but —” He can’t help feeling betrayed. This whole time, he’d thought — “People usually do, so I figured — I don’t know, we’ve spent a decent amount of time together the past couple weeks, and if you knew that kind of feels like — like it’s been under false pretenses, or —” How he actually feels is like the girl at the end of a teen movie who learns that someone was asking her out as a joke. Ready to run crying from the dance, or else set the gym on fire with his mind. But that would really sound crazy, so he doesn’t say it.

Rishi sits on the edge of the bed, gingerly, leaving space between them. “Like how, like I was pretending not to know as like — subterfuge? To trick you into what, thinking we were friends? Into _maybe_ sleeping with me, a week and a half after I was supposed to have left town?”

“I — maybe?” Quentin says miserably. “I know — I know it must sound totally deranged, but — people get so fucking weird about it, I don’t even know anymore what…”

“That’s a hell of a long con,” Rishi says gently. “I mean, you’d think if I had a grand plan to seduce the guy who saved the world, it would have involved more wine and mood music, and less dragging his ass to a fucking haunted house for no money.” Quentin laughs a little at that. “The part where you I made you throw up on the sidewalk because you’d just watched four dead people get shot — _damn_ I’ve got game.”

It helps that he’s making a joke of it, because — because he’s right. It’s ridiculous. Nothing about anything Rishi’s actually done or said makes sense for any kind of sinister ulterior motive, and Quentin feels stupid for worrying, but he still can’t let it go, because he just — it’s been so long since he knew who he was in himself or in the world that he feels like he can’t trust his own assessment of what makes sense or not. And he’s trying to trust himself, right now. Or — trying to figure out what he would need to begin trusting himself again. “Why didn’t you ever bring it up?”

Rishi takes a moment to respond, which Quentin appreciates. Like he wants to give a real answer. “I guess,” he finally says, “I mostly assume people are not exactly eager to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them. Because — I know I’m not. Usually when people ask me how I got into ghosts, I tell them I watched too many horror movies as a kid and the obsession stuck.”

Quentin nods, considering this. “But you told me. About — your sister.”

“I did tell you,” Rishi says. “I felt like I kind of owed you — I mean, not to keep bringing up my extremely sexy idea, but I had just watched you puke your guts out during a panic attack you were having because you wanted to help me with my fucking research. Telling the truth seemed like the least I could do. Plus —” He hesitates, tilts his head to the side. “Working _with_ someone — it’s different, than — I don’t know, networking with someone over cheap wine and cheese platters at a conference, you know? We were going to be doing magic together — I know not everyone feels that way, but for me that’s kind of intimate, if I’m being real. Not, I mean, you know, setting up a joint silencing ward together is one thing, but — this was _my_ magic. My theory, my design, my shit that had never been done before. I don’t need to be best friends with everyone I’ll work like that with, but at the same time I don’t want to — I want it to be with someone I trust. Someone I can be real with. Because that stuff, the magic I’ve devoted my life to — that _is_ me, in a way.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. He does know. For a brief painful second he thinks about the deep rightness of pieces knitting themselves back together: _this is where we belong; this is what belongs to you_.

“I am sorry,” Rishi says. “If I’d known this was how you felt — but you didn’t say anything. I thought I was following your cue. That’s all it was, I swear.”

“You’re right,” Quentin says. “I didn’t say anything.” He could have, at any point. But he wanted not to ask more than he wanted to know. Another choice he didn’t let himself see he was making. If he had — if he’d been honest enough with himself to talk about it then, if they’d figured it out and moved forward — better late than never, probably, but there’s a sting at imagining the version of his life in which he had been just a little better just a little earlier on. “Well, now I kind of wish I hadn’t killed the mood,” he says, trying for a wry tone. “This probably would have been fun if I weren’t out of my fucking mind.”

“I mean,” Rishi says, smiling just short of slyly, “no pressure at all — but I’m a fucking academic, man. This would be _far_ from the most awkward conversation I’ve ever had before hooking up with someone.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Oh you have no idea,” Rishi says, shaking his head. “Our interpersonal skills, as a class — not top-notch.” Quentin laughs. “And most of them are not as attractive as you are.” Quentin laughs again, rolling his eyes, and Rishi goes on, “For real, that’s not even me hitting on you. It’s just a statistical fact. Some relevant data.”

“Right,” Quentin says, his stomach fluttering, not unpleasantly this time. “You’re just sharing your findings, in the interests of science.”

“You get it,” Rishi says. “I’m just saying — nothing’s off the table, as far as I’m concerned. If you wanted to.”

And Quentin — shouldn’t, right? If he’s trying for a change, trying to believe things _can_ change, then he shouldn’t just do the same thing he’s been doing, which means he shouldn’t fuck someone who thinks he’s a martyr or fuck someone he’s been drinking with all night or fuck someone he’s never going to see again or, you know what, maybe he should just stop having sex entirely for a while, like possibly forever. Maybe he’s done such a good job turning it into an escape that he’s forgotten how to do it any other way. He doesn’t want that, but everything he wants is broken or awful. Maybe what he needs is to learn to set it aside.

He opens his mouth to find some less demented way to politely end the evening, but then he stops. Because —

— because Rishi is looking at him with his crooked smile and dark eyes, and Quentin is thinking back to the moment that felt like a before. It hadn’t felt like he was about to run away; there hadn’t been anything he’d wanted to run away from. It had felt like — like a moment, just a moment, where he was just a person looking at someone he might like to kiss. Or — hadn’t it? He doesn’t know, he realizes with a seasick tilt of despair. It’s been so long since he wanted anything with a part of him deeper than the closed loop of habit or the craving for oblivion; he’s not sure he remembers how. He wants to fix his life and he wants to die and he wants to grow up and he wants to give in and those wires are so crossed and his track record is so shitty that he doesn’t trust himself to know what’s true and what’s a phantom. An echo of the past that feels real enough to compel him, even though by morning it will dissolve. He doesn’t know how he’ll ever trust himself again. Is this how it’s going to be now, if he means it about doing something new — always this pit of lurking doubt?

He doesn’t have to do this.

He can’t remember the last time he let himself feel this uncertain.

_The real curse was, he only played when he could win…_

Quentin watches himself bring his hand to the side of Rishi’s face; feels himself touch the soft skin there, fingers dusting his sharp jaw. He doesn’t know if he wants this or if he should, if his impulse or his doubts are the story he should be wary of, but he thinks — this doesn’t feel like something that’s coming from the part of him that wants to die. He doesn’t know if he can still do what he’s trying to do — to just touch someone to touch them, without the desperation to erase himself into their body — but he wants — god, he wants to believe that he can.

Maybe that’s what he’s after: proof of concept. To find out if somehow this part of him has still survived.

He watches himself lean in to kiss Rishi, slow and steady and not at all sure. When their lips meet it doesn’t feel like a promise to make him forget. It doesn’t feel like a promise of anything, beyond this moment. It feels soft and hot and a little bit scary. The way it feels to kiss somebody new. His heart is beating hard: proof that he’s nervous. Proof that he’s alive.

Quentin scoots his body closer on the bed, near enough to touch him with ease. He can’t bring himself to say _let’s take it slow_ , but it seems Rishi feels it’s only polite to let the person who had the make-out meltdown set the pace, and Quentin takes his time. He shifts his hand to cup the back of Rishi’s neck, sets his other hand at his waist, thinking: I’m doing this. I’m running my palm along his back, because I want to feel the heat there. I’m kissing at the curve of his shoulder, because I want to know if he likes it. I’m shifting to be on his lap, because I want to feel his chest against mine, the heat building between us. Our heartbeats pumping life.

It’s not like it means anything. Quentin thinks that it shouldn’t feel as different from the sex he’s been having as it does. He’s closer to sober by now than he’s used to, but it’s still a one-night stand with someone he barely knows, someone he might never again see. They’re not going to start text-flirting and coordinating long weekends when Rishi goes back to Maine. And yet — it is different. To have this transient connection that might evaporate half-forgotten but know that that isn’t the entire point. To hook up caught in the high of the evening and their success after disappointment, drawn together by their bodies and the late hour and the weeks of working together, the spirit of celebration and magic. To be kissed by someone who — does know him, some. Someone he’s never bared his soul for, but never hid from or lied to, either; whatever he does know is something that’s real. It’s not like it means anything, but it doesn’t mean _nothing_ , either, and it turns out that might matter. Quentin takes off his — Jesus, is he really wearing a tank top that says KEEP CALM AND BEACH ON? — and that’s absurd but he’s also thinking _I’m taking off my shirt because I want you to see me_ , and it feels like that might matter, too.

It’s nice. It’s really nice, actually: Rishi’s long fingers running firm and eager along Quentin’s side, his breath coming a little faster as tentative sweetness dissipates to let real desire in. The two of them pushing at and on each other, angling in some uncoordinated way until they wind up tilting accidentally to the side until they fall, laughing as they untangle on the mattress and find their way back together, and then Quentin is on his back pushing his hips up against someone nice who’s grinding down against him and running his teeth deliciously over the shell of Quentin’s ear while groaning enticingly as Quentin runs his nails softly down his back and it’s — nice, it’s so nice and so normal and so simple he can’t believe he was afraid of this.

He flips them over so that he can nip a little at Rishi’s chest, kiss down to his belly; Rishi hisses appealingly at the contact and Quentin lingers, letting himself enjoy the feel of his muscles tightening and twisting at the touch, Rishi’s ribcage fluttering in and out. Then he slips a thumb beneath Rishi’s waistband to invite him to help in the process of taking his pants off; once they’re gone, he lifts his chin to look Rishi in the eye as he grins and says, “Hey, is it cool with you if I suck your dick?”

Rishi’s eyebrows do something huge and surprised as he gives a breathless laugh. “Damn, I really do have to start dating outside of academia. Yeah, yes, man, by all fucking means, do what you — _fuck_.”

His hips buck up as soon as Quentin’s got him inside; that’s hot. It’s hot how unsteady his breathing goes once Quentin starts to move, up and down, pressing firmly but not too hard with his tongue; it’s hot, the strangled little noise that comes out of him when Quentin twists gently at his balls. Quentin likes a dick in his mouth, that’s not news; it’s not news either that he’s good at this and that he likes the rest of it, too, likes being good at making someone feel good. But it feels different, too; not like something he needs, but like something he wants. Something he’s doing on purpose. Rishi rests his hand on the back of Quentin’s neck, right at the spot that makes his own cock twitch with the thought of what could be if those fingers curl in and started to pull, and he thinks that he could invite Rishi to work him a little harder and he probably would, and he thinks that if they were going to sleep together again he might, and he thinks that tonight he won’t because he likes this, too: just touching, warm and soft. It’s nice. It’s enough.

He’s had so much fucking sex lately and never, not once has it ever felt like enough to give him what he really wanted, but this — is. Might be. For now.

Rishi does tug at him, gently, when he starts to warn Quentin that he’s getting close, and Quentin presses a hand down against his hipbone to make his own intentions clear, and it’s — it’s great, it’s just great, Rishi saying hoarsely “Fuck, Quentin — fuck, _Quentin_ —” while his hips start to thrust of their own accord, Quentin’s name from his mouth only for him and only for this, uneven and quick until he’s coming in Quentin’s mouth.

Quentin holds still until he’s sure it’s done, then he sits back on his heels, enjoying the sight of Rishi laid out and slightly dazed in front of him. “Are doctoral students good at that part?” he says. “Or is that another area where their skills are — what was it? Not top-notch?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Rishi says, laughing. “Don’t rub it in.”

“I’m asking for science,” Quentin says. “I want to know what the current literature says.”

Rishi props himself up on his elbows halfheartedly, then gives up and flops back down. “Get your ass down here so I can return the favor.”

Quentin lies down next to him, not sure what’s coming next. Rishi kisses him full and deep and Quentin shivers; that’s always hot, to him, a filthy post-blowjob kiss. Rishi pulls at Quentin’s shorts, playfully impatient, and Quentin concedes to awkwardly slither out of them; then he kisses Rishi, hard and hungry, pressing his hard-on against his thighs, and when he thinks he’s painted a picture whispers, “We could also just —”

Rishi moves his hand down and grips Quentin’s cock, hard, quickly casting to get it wet before starting to drag his hand up and down, finding his rhythm with Quentin’s movements; Quentin’s breath stutters and catches. “Sure,” Rishi says conversationally, “we absolutely could just —” He twists his palm once against the head there and Quentin jerks forward, catches his teeth on Rishi’s shoulder with a groan. Rishi laughs, keeps moving; thumbs with his other hand at the space behind Quentin’s ear, turns his head to catch him in a sloppy hot-breathed kiss.

It’s good. Quentin can’t believe there’s anything in him left to feel this good, after all this time. To let the feeling and the ache and the instinct take over not like he’s disappearing into them but like he’s diving beneath the waves, surrounded and suspended and alert to the sensation at every spot that can be touched. He comes faster and harder than he expected, making a series of wildly unattractive noises into Rishi’s mouth as he spurts stickiness between them, shuddering at the mess of it, and for a moment, riding out the last aftershocks while Rishi rests his forehead against his own, Quentin feels almost deliriously pleased with himself. _See_ , some voice in him says, _that’s still you. You still can. You’re not dead yet_.

And then, hideously, hatefully, he starts to fucking cry.

“Oh my god,” he manages to get out through his tears, “I’m sorry, I’m _so_ sorry, this is not —” He sits up, trying to wipe at his face although with how hard he’s crying it doesn’t do much good. “Please don’t take this personally, I mean I’m sure that’s tough but, uh — I swear, this is not about — what just happened — that was, that was good, that _great_ actually — like, almost too great? Maybe? And now I’m — it’s like you said, uh, how did you say it, that I’m, I’m obviously going through a —”

“Nervous breakdown?” Rishi offers, gently wry. “Existential crisis?”

“Yeah,” Quentin chokes out; he’s like really fucking crying, damn, this is not some chopping onions shit, what the fucking goddamn _fuck_. “Yeah, I — look, you don’t have to, you can go, you know,” he babbles inanely, “I know you’re traveling tomorrow, you shouldn’t feel, like, obligated, or —”

“Uh,” Rishi says. “If you want privacy, I can give you some space, but I’m actually like — not dying to run out on the person I just had sex with who is now crying. Like.” He touches Quentin’s arm, softly, just above the elbow, and Quentin doesn’t flinch but he does choke out another sharp sob.

“Okay,” Quentin says, no idea what he means by that. He lets Rishi’s touch guide him back down and onto his side, facing the rest of the room so that his back is pressed up against Rishi’s chest, Rishi’s arm around his waist.

“How’s that?” Rishi says softly.

Quentin says “Yeah,” which is not an answer to the question that was asked. He shakes his head, throat still working. “I really am sorry — it’s just — it’s been a really fucking weird year —”

“Yeah,” Rishi says kindly, so kindly, and that’s what really does it — Quentin is full-on bawling now, huge snotty hiccupy cries that feel like they come from his entire body, his muscles tensing with the effort of expelling whatever feeling is leaking out of him.

He really has no idea why he’s crying; he’s not even sure he’d say that he’s sad, although there’s sadness there, beating down on him like a storm. It’s barely an emotional response at all. Instead it feels like an almost purely physical reaction. Like a sneeze, or like — like, fine, an orgasm — this indescribable mountain of tension that needs to be released, for reasons and through mechanisms he can’t control or understand, and it feels while he’s in it like it will never shift and never move and he’ll be here forever, crying his eyes out for a grief he can’t even name. And then suddenly it dies down, like rain dwindling until the clouds drift apart and the air is still, and he feels — embarrassed as shit, mostly, but beneath that is a buzz of something good.

“I’m sorry,” he says one more time. “I’m — I mean I can be crazy, but that’s pretty crazy even for me.”

“Grad school, remember?” Rishi says. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I don’t —” Quentin shifts to his back so he can look at him. At some point during his freakout, Quentin notices, Rishi cast efficiently to clean them up. “I really don’t know what that was about, but it wasn’t — it wasn’t anything you did, that’s for sure.” He gives a smile and finds that it feels real. “I guess I have some — I don’t know, some leftover stuff from — who even fucking knows, honestly.”

Rishi nods, brushes a strand of Quentin’s hair off his forehead. “You know,” he says, “for the nameless apparitions — a poltergeist, say — there’s this phenomenon that happens sometimes, after it’s been cleared. Usually immediately following the exorcism, although it’s been known to happen as long as a year afterwards. There’ll be an echo of its effects — not the ghost itself, but like… if it slammed doors, people will hear a door slam. The illusion of an object will appear where it shouldn’t been, even though the object hasn’t actually been moved. And the weird part, from a scientific perspective, is that — in cases where they’ve studied this, there’s absolutely nothing that we have any instruments or specialties to pick up that registers. No ectoplasmic radiation, no energy abnormalities of any kind, no residue, no disruptions to the ambient — nothing. According to everything we know, it should be normal. But it’s not. Not until — I don’t know. Until something in there gets something out of its system, maybe. Whatever it is that lingers after the thing that lingers is gone.”

“That makes sense,” Quentin says.

Rishi gives him that lopsided smile. “Yeah.” He shifts to his back, settling in like he’s getting ready to go to sleep. “With figural ghosts, we haven’t seen that happen. But the ability to clear any of them is so new. There’s been records of psychic oscillations, teleradiance — things that operate on the people nearby, particularly magical adepts. Other places have like, weird weather shit, inexplicable smells — really out there stuff. And some people have identified persistent phenomena in the surrounding area and proposed a connection to recent clearances, even if they’re not wholly localized. If I come back here — and like, I think with what I’m bringing to the committee this topic is guaranteed approval — it would probably be a full academic year, and I might spend that whole time or longer trying to clear the La Jolla site, but if not — if my shit works, and works faster than that — that’s what I’d be sticking around to investigate. Because there’s power in transformation, always. And we’re barely starting to understand how that plays out.”

“Mmm.” Quentin feels his own eyes drawing shut.

“That’s why hauntology rules.” Rishi’s voice is getting drowsy. “I came for what I came for, but I really do love it for itself now, because — it’s all mystery, still. There’s so much we don’t know.”

He sounds so psyched about that, even through the sleepiness. Quentin drifts off with this idea blurry in his mind: the terror and miracle of not knowing, like the terror and the miracle of the house in La Jolla which is still haunted but is not the same.

*

He wakes up while the light is early morning soft to the sounds of Rishi getting dressed enough to make it back to his own room without incident. Rishi catches him opening his eyes, blinking in half-conscious haziness, and offers an apologetic smile. “I was trying not to wake you — sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Quentin says, smiling back.

“I wish I could stay a little later than ass o’clock,” Rishi says, “but I have a ton of shit to do in the next thirty-six hours.”

“The pedagogy seminar,” Quentin says. “I remember.”

“Yeah.” Rishi does a final glance and pats his pockets like he’s making sure he hasn’t left anything. “Listen, Quentin — you have my number, right? It gets a little insular, up in the fucking Maine woods with my six-person cohort all the time. Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“I won’t,” Quentin says.

“And,” Rishi says, “I know I keep saying it but — seriously, thanks again.”

“You too,” Quentin says. Or thinks he says; sleep is already drawing him back in.

*

He dozes for another few hours and when he wakes up for real it’s still morning and the day is bright and he feels — good. Good like he got laid last night; good like he did magic last night, the real shit. Good like he’s not sorry. His body feels lighter than it did yesterday. Like some extraneous gravity turned itself off. Quentin feels so good that on a whim he reaches for his phone and tries to cast to fix the screen. It doesn’t work, but — he can live with that. Maybe someday. Tomorrow is September, he remembers. Despite the many semesters that have ended in disaster September retains that bounce: new schedule copied into the front page of his planner, college-ruled notebooks with empty white sheets, sharp yellow pencils with their erasers clean and pink. And today —

He grins at the ceiling, buoyant with the possibility bubbling within him from his head to his toes, in the tips of his fingers, in every cell that last night he did something he thought he might never do again, feeling down to his marrow a truth from the inspirational posters in the office of a high school guidance counselor: _Today is the first day of the rest of your life!_

For the first time in longer than he can remember, that feels like more of a promise than a threat.

*

Quentin works a little private speaker on his phone spell to blast the Violent Femmes while he showers and brushes his teeth and puts clothes on, half-dancing to the beat while he moves. He feels so on he’s bursting with it, lit up like a Christmas tree, a really tacky gaudy one, with a propulsive buzz he doesn’t want to waste.

The first thing he does once he’s dressed is text Kady to ask if he can send her some accountability texts for a while, because last night turned out fine and he’s still not convinced he’s an alcoholic but the previous week was a shitshow and he thinks it might be good to take the option off the table for a while. Thirty days, just as a reset; he doesn’t love this, but he thinks he’ll feel better about himself if he gets to the end knowing he can do it. That’s the thing, right? Proving himself capable of the shit he’s not sure he can do. September’s a good time for sober productivity anyway. Or, sober-ish: he also heads back to the dispensary to restock, because it’s better than the alternative and he’s not fooling himself that he can afford to be all that picky yet about what gets him from one day to the next. It’s not every day you get to bang a hot grad student who doesn’t even mind that you’re a total psychological freakshow with major emotional problems.

He gets organic paninis with Luisa for lunch and winds up telling her about last night, not divulging any details but hyped on the novelty of having something to disclose. She gives him a gratifyingly theatrical gasp, then says, “I think I am duty bound to ask, though: if he does move back and you’re still around, there’s not going to be _house drama_ , is there? That’s like, sacred to us. We’re very proud of our status as the least drama-prone magic house in western San Diego.”

“God, no,” Quentin says, shaking his head; the possibility sincerely hadn’t occurred to him. “It wasn’t like that. It was — I dunno, we’d done this cool thing, and we were excited about it, and it was nice. Chill.”

“Okay. Well in that case —” She holds up a palm and says in an imitation of True Broishness, “Yoooo, congrats on tapping that, bro.”

Quentin laughs and concedes to give her five. “How’s the bassist?”

“An idiot,” she says with an irritated flick of her eyes. “But _so_ hot. I really need to close the deal or move on with my life soon but his dumbness and his hotness are like the unstoppable force and the immovable object warring against each other and I just don’t know which one’s gonna win out.” Quentin makes a sympathetic noise and shakes his head in disapproval as she shows him the latest texts, which feature an unreasonable quantity of sixty-nine jokes and a lot of clearly stoned ( _hopefully_ stoned) and poorly spelled ramblings about how the cool thing about music is that music is sound which is also art. (“Am I missing something?” he asks, and she closes her eyes to say, “Unfortunately, you are not.”)

They part ways with a promise to meet back at the house where Luisa’s doing a group dinner that Quentin is apparently helping with now, and a half-made plan to spend some time talking vernacular magic this week. Quentin walks to a stop to wait twenty-five minutes to take a bus to a giant sporting goods store to buy some shoes made for actual running, and maybe some running socks? That sounds like a thing? He opens the email he ignored from Julia weeks ago, with its links and its bulleted tips: running socks, definitely a thing. He gets the shoes and a pack of socks and then, looking up the schedule and staring down another fucking twenty-five minute wait, he walks to the far back corner of the store to buy a goddamn bike, because he lives in California and this is his life now, and because he’s trying to make that life one he’s not constantly tempted to throw away. He hasn’t ridden in years, but after a couple humiliating minutes adjusting to the position and the mechanics in the parking lot outside the store, it turns out what people say is true: there are some things the body always remembers how to do.

*

“So one way you can think of it is —” Luisa breaks off and shakes her head. “You’re lucky I tried this with Cynthia first. I’ve already put in my ten thousand hours of trying to figure out a way to actually put this shit into words that sort of make sense to someone outside my head. She had to deal with a _lot_ of babbling before I found something that worked for her.”

They’re in her bedroom, which is cozily decorated in shades of blue: walls painted teal, little mirrors in sky-blue frames with seashells on them on the wall, plush turquoise rug. The overall effect makes Quentin feel a little bit like he’s in some underwater cove. “So what’d you land on?”

“Okay,” Luisa says, suddenly almost businesslike. “So magic is — it’s inside us, right? It’s something that we have, something that we do. But it’s also outside us — it’s the ambient, the channels, the currents and all that stuff I don’t know much about. And what we think of as _doing_ magic, like the action of a spell — that’s the result of those two things meeting. When you run Popper six, or whatever, you’re directing the magic inside you to connect to the magic outside — it’s almost like a chemical reaction, where the process of the spell is the catalyst. The catalyst doesn’t _cause_ the reaction; it makes it possible by making it easier.”

“Reducing the activation energy,” Quentin says, a phrase apparently remembered from AP Chem.

Luisa grins, rolling her eyes. “Sure, if you wanna be a fucking nerd about it.”

“Oh I _always_ wanna be a fucking nerd about it,” Quentin says, smiling.

“So you can think of these two parts of magic,” Luisa says, “as two levers, kind of. Any magic I’ve ever seen a human being do, as far as I can tell, requires both of them. And any human being who can _do_ magic has _some_ ability to activate both of them — the magic they create, and the magic they draw on. But the — ratios, I guess — can shift. You can do a spell really working your tuts and focusing your energy and just barely touch the ambient to get it going, or you can get the same results with just — almost a spark of your own power, if you can really call the ambient in to do the work for you.” She tilts her head to the side, considering. “I should say — I don’t have a ton of experience in this, mostly because I’m way too lazy to learn to do shit twice when once is good enough, but you do kind of get the sense, hanging around people who practice both ways, that some things feel easier with one method than another, although I don’t know how much that varies from person to person. Anyway — with me so far?”

“I think so,” Quentin says. He’s trying to picture it, almost like — well, like a diagram in a science textbook: some outline of a body, little arrows inside it showing the magic there; arrows around it to indicate the magic outside. A little orange star, maybe, where they meet.

“The major difference between the two ways I know how to do magic,” Luisa says, “is how much they emphasize each side of the equation. The institutional magic, or academic magic, whatever you want to call it — that really focuses on the magic inside you. It’s about precision, and intention, and achieving control even before you’re actualizing anything — a spell like Woolf’s, right?” She demonstrates: a few quick graceful tuts, and a tiny sparkler shoots into the sky. “It’s not huge, but it’s a powerful spell in that if you have the power and you do it right, it’ll work exactly as written. Vernacular magic, or at least the kind I’m familiar with, is more —” She hesitates. “Honestly I kind of hate the word intuitive, because for starters, it’s straight-up _not_ if you’ve never done it before, and it feels like a really loaded word in terms of these historical binaries around like, gender and race and intellect and whatever —” Quentin nods like he knows what she’s talking about. “But that’s kind of what it is. It — it _starts_ by being able to feel your way to the magic. It’s not something where you’ll have that first-year magic student experience of practicing tuts till your knuckles are sore and then suddenly, boom, to your own surprise, congratulations, you just did magic. You make the connection before the action.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, nodding slowly. “But like — how?”

Luisa laughs. “Yeah, there’s the fucking rub, right? But I mean — you know what magic feels like, sometimes. Once you knew it was there, once you started practicing it — you started picking up on it. You felt it, when it was gone or when we had the fucking shortages — you knew when you were somewhere it was stronger or weaker. You can tell when you walk into some place that’s warded up to high heaven. Right?”

Briefly Quentin remembers — they stepped through the clock into the woods in the other world and they could feel it, they could _feel_ it, the first time in so long, like water in a desert, and Eliot — he puts this thought to the side. Weed is a miracle drug. “Yeah.”

“So it’s sort of about learning to do that on purpose,” Luisa says. “Learning to reach out and — feel what’s already there, when it’s not doing anything, learning to feel its different levels and layers, so you can find what you need in it and instead of working on it, getting it, or — almost inviting it, really, is how it feels sometimes — to work for you. Honestly it’s a little like — do you ever meditate?”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Do I seem like a person who really loves to sit alone with his thoughts?”

“Not all meditation is like that,” Luisa says. “I have this yoga teacher I really like — anyway. You don’t have to meditate to learn this, although it might help. But it’s kind of a useful analogy, because it’s about trying to pay attention to the stuff that’s already there. Your breath is already there; you’re already breathing. Focusing on it makes it conscious, makes you realize how much is actually happening. How much you can influence this — automatic, unconscious movement.”

“Huh,” Quentin says. “So — so how do I do that?”

Luisa purses her lips. “Let’s start with something you can already do. A fire spell — you know at least one of those, right?”

Quentin would rather start with something lower in emotionally loaded associations, but — “Sure, yeah.”

“Can you run it?” Luisa says. “On, uh —” With slight sheepishness Quentin takes the pipe he bought from the dispensary out of his pocket and she says wryly, “Sure, that works. And while you cast, try to hone in on — the moment the external magic comes into play.”

Quentin casts, trying not to think about long elegant fingers waving in what always felt even after years like a welcome early on at the cottage patio, and — and he _can_ feel it: that nanosecond hitch, right before the bowl lights, where he’s doing magic but it’s not only his.

“Okay,” he says, extinguishing the flicker with magic. “I think I see what you’re talking about.”

“So you’re looking for that,” Luisa says. “That — that strand in the ambient, that texture, that tension — when I light a burner, or whatever —” She demonstrates, flicking her wrist to light the bowl again and snuff it out. “I’m — I’m reaching for that part of magic, because I know it, because I’ve done this before, and I’m bringing it down to me, instead of pushing myself onto it the way I do for hammering a nail, or something. And — the gesture doesn’t _not_ matter, there’s some that involve words or other triggers, a lot of the herbalism stuff I know is of this type — but it really all starts with, and flows from, being able to reach into the magic and feel it.”

Quentin nods; bites his lip; and tries to reach. Closes his eyes to focus; sits in the dark behind his eyelids and the quiet of the room and — and fucking what? This is stupid, some part of him argues. It’s a part that sounds uncannily like his first-year self, struggling through introductory tut sequences trying to get his hands to do something, _anything_ , and — that kid was a dumbass, so, okay, he can ignore that. He can ignore that and focus on the magic he knows is there, is everywhere, like air; he doesn’t notice the air usually, either, but he can, right? If he thinks about — the outer edge of his skin, the place his body stops being his body; the soft flow through his nostrils and the back of his throat, the presence moving his lungs in and out — shit, is he fucking meditating? _That’s_ a mean trick. Stop — stop getting distracted; the air is a metaphor but forget the air, and look for — the _magic_ —

He opens his eyes, startled. “Oh, shit —” It’s gone as quickly as it came, but — “I think I had it,” he says, marveling a little at the novelty of it. “I think — I could feel — it was like that spell, but like it was running on its own, or like it was about to — shit, I can’t, I can’t feel it now, but — I _had_ it —”

Luisa gives a little clap. “Yes! That’s it. That’s what you’re looking for. So now,” and she’s giving him a sly grin, “all you have to do is be able to do that on command, and hold it as long as you need to while you’re also directing your own power to combine with it.”

Quentin makes a face at her. “That easy, huh?”

“Exactly that easy,” she agrees. “And exactly that hard.” She smiles. “Do you wanna keep working at it? When Cynthia and I were doing this, it usually helped to have me around, especially early on.”

“I want to keep working on it… eventually?” Quentin says. “But if we’re being very honest with each other, right now I kind of want to smoke up and watch weird YouTube shit.”

“I’m down,” she says, and he lights up the bowl again, feeling one more time for that moment where something he’s doing becomes something he’s a part of.

*

He starts running again, and it still sucks a lot, but he turns the volume up on Passion Pit for pep and does it anyway and after a few attempts he must concede that it is in fact marginally less horrible in shoes with some, what was it the guy at the store said, arch support and cushioning? Sure. It’s warm out still but the peak of summer heat seems mostly to have passed; it turns out running is also less hateful when you don’t have to choose between doing it in temperatures as hot as Satan’s armpit or dragging yourself out five minutes after waking up. Sometimes instead of going through half of the beginner plan Julia sent him and turning around to finish sweaty and gasping back at the house he keeps going until his time is up and then walks vaguely house-ward, going out of his way to head to the coast to amble back along the beach or taking detours on streets he hasn’t seen yet to make the city feel more like where he lives than a place he’s visiting. He has mixed feelings about this, honestly — it makes it feel more like he’s done something permanent than like he’s taking a break, which wasn’t exactly the plan — but it’s evident by now that his initial projections of a few weeks of sun and leisure were wildly optimistic for fixing the titanic morass of whatever the fuck is wrong with him. He may as well adjust.

He gets the corners established in the stupid Yoda puzzle and starts sorting the rest of the pieces by color; he’s still smoking but he brings back his hour between cigarettes rule and adds a second rule that if he wants one he has to spend five minutes on the puzzle first and he mostly sticks to it, although he also starts chewing a lot of gum. He watches a YouTube video allegedly for novice whittlers and at the end his anglerfish looks more like a flounder with a tragic genetic disorder but it’s so ugly it makes him laugh and he gives it to Luisa as a gag. He folds a couple dozen origami cranes before he manages one that looks passably birdlike and — right, so this is why people _have_ hobbies, probably — the satisfaction of it is such that he immediately does it again and sets them on the corners of his desk, watching protectively like the library lions. He discovers there’s a particular level of stoned on a particular strain of weed that makes calligraphy drills feel comfortingly calm instead of hideously dull and he’s not sure doing them high really helps with the muscle memory they’re supposed to be building but that’s not really the point. The point is the process. The point is the doing. Doing, and doing, and doing, until one day —

He messes around with the broken coffee maker, brainstorming in the Notes app methods that might be adapted for an alternative mending protocol, with some thoughts on their pitfalls: reflective replications (newish, not thoroughly tested), horomantic salt-circle variations (allegedly safe time magic, but who really wants to fuck with that), Butler Box (materials-intensive, especially for a mechanism this complex). He tries to choose one to start with but stops, worried that if he picks a particularly bad one he’ll wreck the device beyond what he can repair. After some consideration of pros and cons Quentin sets the problem aside for another day, grateful that he can believe another day is a thing he’ll have, and laces up his sneakers and goes for a run (jog) (jog slash walk) (it’s what the program says), the bay at his side and _there’s a way I’ll make light of my treacherous life_ in his ears, and like — maybe. Maybe, one day, there could be.

*

“So how’s it feel to be back in the city?” Quentin asks.

“ _So_ good,” Julia says. He can hear the relief in her voice. “There’s really nothing like five months in hotels to make you appreciate your own bed. I _cooked_ yesterday, like, for _fun_ , just because I was so excited to be able to use a kitchen.”

“Wow,” Quentin says, mock-impressed. “Your travels really did change you.”

“I’m a new woman,” Julia says. “Watch out, Martha. I’m coming for you.” They both laugh; this feels nice, Quentin thinks. Warm and familiar and easy. “So what’s new with you?”

Quentin considers. It feels like nothing, but also like a lot. “I bought actual running shoes,” he says. “And I’m using that program, so. That’s going less horribly than it was.”

“See!” she says. “And you’re stretching?”

“One thing at a time, Jules, please,” he says. Adding anything above the bare minimum to his marginal exercise routine still seems wildly ambitious.

“Well, make sure you’re taking at least a day off between runs. You don’t want to overdo it when you’re starting something new. You’re breaking down the muscles when you push them in ways they’re not used to — that’s why you get sore. Then your body repairs them and that’s how you get better at it. But it can’t do that if you don’t get enough rest.”

Quentin laughs. “Yeah, don’t worry. I am absolutely not in danger of running too much.” What else is there. “I’ve also been — have you ever come across any work on vernacular magic?”

“Vernacular magic?” Julia repeats. He can almost hear her brow furrowing in curiosity.

“That’s what Luisa calls it — I don’t know if someone’s given it an official name somewhere — but it’s like —” And he catches her up on what he’s picked up and been working on, the things he’s learning about a way of doing magic Brakebills never even acknowledged.

“That’s so cool,” Julia says, sounding almost a little envious. “And fascinating. No, I haven’t read anything about magic like that, but — I’ll start looking. Even if they don’t teach it, there must be something written about it somewhere.”

“Let me know if you find anything,” Quentin says. He’s curious, too, he realizes — curious like the day he spotted Luisa lighting the burner on the stove. It’s nice, to feel that part of him shifting back into place.

“I will,” Julia says. Then, thoughtfully, “You know — now that I’m thinking back, I feel like I must have seen some of this kind of spell being done in the past couple months. I’d have these little moments, you know, hanging out with people and seeing something that looked — off, from what I knew, but just figuring I’d seen it wrong, or… Penny and I, we wound up getting asked to make a stop on the Pine Ridge Reservation on our way through South Dakota — we didn’t have any contacts there, but someone heard about what we were doing and it turned out some of them had received the mark — and after we wrapped up, they invited us to hang out for the celebration, and they did this — insanely cool aerial show, all kinds of sparkler and light effects, it was like — like seeing an aurora borealis on Ecstasy, or something — and I remember watching the people running it and thinking it was weird that I couldn’t catch a single tut. At the time I honestly thought, oh, maybe it’s like, religious or something — like the magic of the Maenads, or something… But maybe I should have assumed it was just magic, being done differently.”

“Maybe,” he says.

Julia gives a rueful laugh. “God, I’m like — the number one person for wanting everyone to get the picture that, hello, there is more to magic than fucking Brakebills, and still — it’s crazy what you don’t even know that you can’t see, because you’ve never thought to look for it.”

“Yeah,” Quentin agrees. “It’s a lot.”

*

In a dimly lit thrift store in North Park where Luisa is looking for a gift for a friend with kitschy taste and Quentin is looking for a way to pass the time, he stops by a narrow bookshelf near the housewares to rifle through the collection of yellowing hardbacks, corny self-help manuals, and recent-ish bestsellers. There’s a slim collection of _The Waste Land and Other Poems_ , lightly annotated in someone’s neat script, and he sets it aside; wasn’t he going to start reading again, at one point? Maybe he should ease back into it with something he already knows.

“Oh shit,” he hears Luisa’s voice behind him. “Check this out.”

He turns around: she’s holding out for him to see a delicately illustrated map of Fillory, big enough that she has to stretch her arms out wide to unfurl it, covering her face. “Oh,” he says, caught off guard. It’s one of the J. T. Richardson maps, released alongside a box set with new full-color plates for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of _The Wandering Dune_. He can see the finely shaded details of the turrets at Castle Whitespire.

Luisa drops her arms to poke her head out. “Were you a Fillory kid? I was like, _obsessed_.”

Quentin gives a wry smile. “You could say that. Not so into it now.”

“Got too cool?” she teases.

“Got too real,” he says. “I — I’ve been to the actual Fillory, more than once.”

“No shit,” she says, eyes wide. “Damn, your life is nuts, dude.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s — let’s just say the books make it seem nicer than it is.”

“Bummer,” Luisa says. She folds the map back up, regarding its front-facing panel. “Thomas likes nostalgia, but I don’t think this was ever his thing — I can probably find something better.” She puts it back down on the messy table of assorted knickknacks and turns her attention to an array of porcelain paperweights shaped like appallingly ugly children.

Quentin can’t resist taking a closer look at the map. On the backside there’s a yellow sticker marking it at eight dollars; it’s worth _way_ more than that on the internet if you know where to look. He opens it back up cautiously, thinking with a twinge he shoves aside of poor drowned Benedict, noting the heavy paper, letting his eyes glide over the minuscule leaves of the Flying Forest, the ornate hands and Roman numerals indicating the Clock Barrens. The brightly colored pattern — his throat catches — that was how Richardson imagined the mosaic. It’s gorgeously done; he has no use or desire for it, but he can’t stop the thought from coming — Margo would love this.

But his friendship with Margo is collateral damage in the war he waged on his own life. She’s not interested in hearing from him anytime soon, map or no. Quentin folds it back up and sets it aside.

Walking away from the table he spots a stack of plain white ceramic plates — maybe a dozen, thin and chipped, five bucks for the set. That’s something he could use; he scoops them up carefully, lifting the book to balance on the top, and finds his way to where Luisa has selected a heathered gray T-shirt with faded picture of Alf. “Throwing a dinner party?” she says, eyeing his selection. “You know, we have plates at the house.”

“Your garbage isn’t good enough for me,” Quentin deadpans. “No, this is for — I told you I want to see if I can find a way to fix the coffee maker, right, without being able to do any of the usual mending spells. I was thinking I could use these to experiment — they’re a little simpler, so I might be able to figure out if I’m on the right track even if I’m not there yet, and if I really destroy something it’s no big deal.”

“Smart,” Luisa says, heading towards the line at the cash register. “Do you have any ideas?”

“Sort of,” he says, following behind her through the narrow walkways in the shop. “There’s some things that seem worth looking into, but I don’t know enough about them to really call any of them a plan yet. Really I should start doing some research to see if they’re actually viable.”

“You know, if you’re getting into the theory weeds,” Luisa says, “me and some friends do this — we call it a book club for people who are afraid of commitment, although that’s mostly a joke. Wednesday evenings, pretty much every week but most people kind of drop in and out depending on if they have time. Someone brings copies of an article from a magical journal or anthology — usually either something kind of classic most of us haven’t read, or else some obscure thing connected to someone’s niche interest — we all read it and talk about it. Or, talk about it until we’re bored, and then just hang out. If you want, you should stop by. Might be useful.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says appreciatively, “thanks. That sounds fun.”

At the last minute he decides to buy the map after all. If Margo ever deigns to speak to him again, she really will get _such_ a kick out of it.

*

Back at the house he snags a handful of Ziplocs from the kitchen before heading back up to his room, where he puts the map and the book on the nightstand and places the brown paper bag with the plates on top of his desk. He takes out a plate and tries to break it by hand, but apparently ceramic’s not _that_ delicate; he drops it on the floor, but while one of the chips at the edge chips a little more, it doesn’t break. For a second he considers breaking it with magic before remembering that the whole reason he’s in this situation is that he can’t; any non-kinetic explosion spells would be more trouble for this purpose than they’re worth. So — old-fashioned destruction it is.

Quentin throws up a quick silencing ward on his room to avoid disturbing anyone else who might be home and stands with his back at the window, as far from the opposite wall as possible. He lifts the plate, feeling goofily like he’s at practice during one of his distinctly unspectacular years of Little League, and then — freezes, remembering —

— _Then break them on purpose._

His father’s house, too empty and not empty enough; the eyes that were and weren’t the eyes he knew. His life already broken, the future already impossible. And here in the house in New Jersey that had long since stopped being his house, cardboard boxes piled with the things that lingered —

_—They’re your planes. You can do what you want with them. Maybe you’ll feel better._

— the things that —

— he’d wanted —

— he wants —

— to fucking die as ever but he has a plan for this, right, and no Mom or whoever else might be listening inside his brain, lighting up every time you have an emotion that feels like ice and sounds like _KILL YOURSELF_ is not the healthiest or most functional coping mechanism but it’s not even in the top ten worst he’s tried, so —

— in ten minutes his heart is beating normally and he’s not fighting off the impulse to sprint into traffic and he has not brought danger to himself or others and he has not made anyone else clean up his psychological mess and he is considering the prospect of breaking the plates which is exactly what he was doing ten minutes ago and he’s frankly not even _that_ much higher than he was before because his hands were shaking so badly it took forever to set up without making a mess and so by the time he actually started smoking he was already maybe forty percent of the way back to baseline and he stopped as soon as it felt tolerable, so. So there. Quentin feels victorious, and weirdly spiteful about it.

— _Maybe you’ll feel better_.

He had felt better, actually. It had felt good to just — be the ugliest parts of himself, uncareful and unforgivable. To listen to the monster telling him to act like a monster. It had felt good, not to worry or care or try. Even back then.

It’s been so long. So long that he’s wanted only the worst.

He turns the plate over in his hands. He shouldn’t do this, maybe; he should find another way, rather than risk — whatever he’d be risking. It feels dangerous, to welcome that memory into the room. Walking those old, violent steps. Only — only it’s not the same, is it? The same shattering arcs, but not to destroy; to find a way to repair. Like Julia said about running, or whatever, the muscles tearing to fix themselves stronger. Breaking to mend.

Quentin gives himself another moment, just to feel sure that he’s making a choice and not giving in. He’s — almost sure. That’s the best he gets these days. Then he turns on _Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?_ and starts smashing.

Half an hour he has a set of broken plates, pieces sealed in their plastic bags, lined up along the back of the closet for storage, awaiting his use. He feels better: wired and satisfied and awake. Not like something broke, but like something is starting.

*

So it’s not like the other stuff is gone. The wreck of his life continues to hover just past his peripheral vision, tamed but no less noxious. Sometimes he has nightmares about dying and sometimes he has nightmares about coming back to life and sometimes he wakes in the middle of the night restless, nerves burning with adrenaline, and he can’t remember what he was dreaming but in his head is the thought like an animal’s cry, _Eliot, Eliot, Eliot_ … During the days he’s low-key stoned basically all the time and even then if he lets himself spend too much time alone and motionless the unanswerable questions creep back in about how he could do the things he’s done and how a person who’s done those things can possibly ever live a real and worthwhile life, and he still doesn’t have answers.

But he’s keeping busy. He whittles a cat, and it looks like a cat. He practices the alphabet in dramatic Gothic letters, and by the billionth time his spaces are even and his angles are consistent. He runs even though it sucks, and it does suck, but if he forces himself to be objective he can tell that it’s occasionally sucking marginally less. He texts Rishi to ask how the semester’s going, nervous when there’s no reply that he overestimated the sincerity of Rishi’s invitation to stay in touch, but that evening he gets back a novel-length text about how psyched his advisor is about his project and how endearing he finds his undergrads. He goes to Luisa’s book club and when she introduces him she says, “He’s a tutter, but he’s cool, so Jenny, be nice,” and a blonde with a nose ring says, “We’ll see,” but she flashes a grin to let him know it’s a joke for Luisa’s benefit, and then they eat corn chips with salsa and talk about this literature review summarizing the drawbacks and benefits of different classes of first aid spells.

It’s not the seeing, it’s the doing. He doesn’t have the answers, but he’s trying to learn to live without them, and maybe that counts for something. He takes his bike out aimlessly on a Sunday, just to get used to riding somewhere more densely populated than suburban New Jersey before he tries to actually get anywhere, and to his surprise it’s nice, despite the hills: the breeze on his face, the sense of freedom and the colors of the city streaming past. The Thermals in his headphones: _We’re self-mending — we’re self-cleansing_ — The next day his legs feel like someone hammered them with a tire iron, but he tries to remember what Julia said: that this is how it works, the body doing what it needs to get better. That it only hurts because he did something new.

*

“You kind of warned me, but it really is a lot harder than it looks,” Quentin says after his nine thousandth failed attempt to light a candle — a measly little candle! — by drawing the magic down.

It feels good to be a beginner at something — to work for a while on something so difficult it crowds everything else out. He’s started getting the hang of the first part — reaching into the magic like a guest, or a reader, and — finding what’s there. After his first few attempts he realized there was something familiar to it after all: it’s what he did without being taught from his first encounter with a broken object, this instinct to connect to the threads of magic crackling at the edges of its pieces, waiting for him to guide them where they needed to move. He remembers his lab partner for that unit, a former star of junior piano competitions who could make his fingers mimic any motion as easily as breathing, baffled that his characteristically graceful tuts were producing less seamless results than Quentin’s effortful motions, and Quentin had tried to explain: _Well you just have to — you know, it’s like — it kind of tells you how it wants the spell to go, right? If you just…_ Trailing off, frustrated and embarrassed because once he tried he realized he had no words for what he was doing, but secretly reassured, too, that there was something he was better at than Conrad. It’s what he feels when he holds the broken coffee maker in his hands, or one of the bags with the smashed plates, something like a vibration happening somewhere beneath the skin, or else just outside it. Before his magic broke, he could take that awareness and bring it into the spell, and he can imagine doing so in a way that would shift the balance. But the idea of what that would feel like hasn’t helped him do it for anything else. “I can’t believe people learn this way on their own — if I’d had to do this at Brakebills I would have flunked out first semester.”

Luisa gives a thoughtful hum. “I’m not sure it’s harder — I think it really depends on what you learn first, and what you wind up practicing.”

“How do you mean?” Quentin asks.

“The way you do magic depends on your goals, right?” she says. “Anyone really _great_ is going to have deep control of intention _and_ intuition, control _and_ awareness, but those don’t necessarily develop in tandem. So if you’re Amelia Popper, and your goal is to put magic down in a book that people will be studying largely on their own, then it makes sense to focus on things like finger positioning and timing and incantations, these kind of concrete, replicable steps that magicians can take to get control. Anyone with a knack for it can read her exercises and do magic if they follow the steps. And if you’re building a whole system of institutionalized magical education, magical training that’s _not_ happening in families or in like, closed religious sects, or select military divisions, or these kind of stable, localized communities where historically it often went on — that’s happening in classes that are select, sure, but aren’t going to give students the kind of individual attention you would have gotten as an apprentice to a craftsman back in the days of guilds — then of course you’re going to favor a system of magic built on those units. And on its own there’s nothing wrong with that — most of the shit I know comes from that tradition. I remember that night Julia was here, she was saying she and Kady want to fully digitize the beginner texts, and that would be amazing. But it comes with trade-offs. It narrows things down. So yeah, a program like that is going to spend less time emphasizing — I don’t even know if there’s an official name for this skill. My mom always used to just say —” She affects a lilting maternal rhythm. “Escucha, Luisita — escucha. Listen.”

Listen. Quentin closes his eyes; tries to open whatever it is inside him that knows how to find what it needs. He can feel it, the quivering strand that he could shape into a fire, if he could only hold it; he can set his internal gaze steady, letting it grow solid in his view. He reaches out, lifting his hand on instinct, and — it’s like trying to catch a fish bare-handed: he’s sure he touches it, but it slips immediately out of his grasp.

When he opens his eyes, Luisa is smiling wide. “Hey, though — you’re getting closer.”

“I am?” he says.

“There was a spark — like a striking match that doesn’t quite flare,” she says. “You didn’t feel it?”

“No,” he says, but then he notices the smell of — “Smoke.”

“Hell yeah,” she says.

Quentin watches the smoke floating for the few seconds it dissipates. Nothing, except that it means he’s on the right track. “Okay, let me try again.”

*

He sends Kady the thirtieth text about what he managed not to do that day and he finds when it’s done he’s not even particularly eager to start doing it again. September becomes October and he wakes up early, he goes for a jog. He walks by the beach, alone or with whoever else wanted to go to the beach that day; he buys a beach towel so he can sit and read poems he wrote essays on years ago, not bothering to understand, just trying to remember what it’s like to enjoy the rhythm of the words: _Let us go then, you and I / when the evening is spread out against the sky…_ He manages to strike a flame without the spells he’s learned for it, and he’s so excited he loses the connection immediately and can’t focus enough to do it again that day, but the memory of it charges him for hours. He writes his name with his carefully angled dip pen in jet black letters, steady and thick, and when the ink dries he looks at _Quentin Makepeace Coldwater_ and thinks: not bad.

He goes to Luisa’s book club with a box of brownies from a fancy bakery on a night she’s working late and realizes he knows the names of everyone there. She staggers through the door the next morning sleepless but elated, showing everyone news coverage of the wildfires blazing, the towns a few miles away filling with smoke, the puzzled local scientists unsure about why San Diego hasn’t been affected, speculating that climate change has done something to the wind patterns in the area. “We fucking did it, this could be huge,” she exults, and everyone who’s home cheers and congratulates her until Toni gently bullies her into going to sleep. They throw a party that weekend to celebrate, and some of the book club people come, and Quentin talks with a Columbia alum from Luisa’s job about their favorite neighborhood spots, mourning the ones that have shuttered since their respective undergrad years, and he even almost sort of dances a little, kind of, or he bounces with acceptable nostalgic enthusiasm when it’s late enough that someone cues up Mr. Brightside on the speakers and the entire room stops whatever they’re doing to roar _COMING OUT OF MY CAGE, AND I’VE BEEN DOING JUST FINE!_ Quentin has three beers and a lot of Diet Coke and his stomach doesn’t feel _great_ in the morning but for just those first few minutes waking up he feels so fucking fine it’s amazing.

He pricks his finger with a needle dipped in saltwater and draws a set of runes on his mirror in blood and angles a flashlight to encase a pile of plate pieces in a Pythagorean triple and as far as he can tell nothing happens. He practices the most minor chronological unwinding spell he can find before setting it to run from a rabbit’s foot with a failsafe in a circle of salt and hand-ground chalcedony surrounding the mess of ceramic, and it starts to melt and make a terrible smell before he can pull the plug. He sets up a Butler Box to try and wrangle the perpetual motion mechanism into reassembling a plate of its own accord and winds up instead pulverizing it into sand. Afterwards he gets on his bike to see if he can return the seaglass touched by a dragon to the magical pawnshop where he got it since he can’t imagine having any use for it in the future and when he returns and dismounts in front of the green wooden house by the bay, he realizes he’s started to think of it as home.

*

Running is still terrible, and he’s still terrible at it. As far as he can tell the plan Julia sent him works around the fundamental terribleness of it by suggesting you treat your body like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pot, beginning with basically a long walk punctuated by a couple _oh, that’s not so bad_! thirty-second bursts and gradually upping the ratio of actual exercise to basic locomotion until one day you’ve tricked yourself into running for twenty-five minutes without having a heart attack. The website specifies this should be “slow” running, like anyone capable of “fast” running, which Quentin is pretty sure is just called “running,” is out here googling _beginner running plans_.

He’s in the seventh week, running (jogging) two whole minutes at a time, sticking near the beach to avoid the latest wave of mid-October heat. The last time he ran (jog-walked), there was an interval in the middle, when he was no longer stiff but not yet exhausted, where he actually didn’t hate it, and he could almost understand what the fuck Julia was talking about re: going slow enought to carry a conversation, and he was listening to the first Killers record because it had been stuck in his head since the party and the music had sounded loud and thrilling and fast. It was over almost as soon as it began but for those two minutes, he had felt like he’d been allowed to peek into the alternate universe of The Running People, enough to understand why they’re into it.

This experience had stirred in him a great optimism which now seems unfounded, as today he is doing the same thing and listening to the same music and it feels like total miserable run-over shit. He’s heaving for air no matter how much he tries to slow down; he’s had a side stitch from like minute one that’s keeping him half hunched over, which is probably not Proper Form, which he keeps hearing is important but does not understand. He feels graceless and flabby and unattractive and vaguely guilty for feeling that way because something something those blog posts Julia used to send him in high school about like Photoshopped magazine covers and eating disorders, or whatever, so apologies to Gloria Steinem (? sure), but also, ugh. Possibly he can be granted clemency on the grounds of having fifty years’ worth of extremely naked memories with someone built like, not that he would appreciate the reference, a fucking Tolkien elf.

He — honest to god _stumbles_ at the thought, nearly trips over his shuffling toes right onto the pavement, which is just, like, why? He’s been doing so well. He did thirty days sober. He joined a book club. He eats vegetables, if someone else cooks or suggests they go to a place that serves them. He’s on _week seven_ , of running but also of not doing anything completely stupid and/or hateful. Yesterday he went an entire twenty-four hours without smoking _any weed_ or drinking _any alcohol_ and _no_ he’s not planning to repeat the endeavor anytime soon and _yes_ he took a not medically recommended dose of melatonin in order to fall asleep with his record intact which could be why he feels like lukewarm roadkill twelve hours later but he _did it_ , because he _could_ , and he’s _doing things_ , he’s doing _so many things_ that have _nothing to do_ with Eliot fucking Waugh, so — so why?

Why can the wisp of a thought of him throw Quentin off course like he’s been hit by a car? Why when he looks inside himself is Eliot always, always there, like a bruise or a bad hip or a smoker’s cough? Why does it matter that he’s beautiful or that he’s gone, when he was beautiful and gone years ago now in the throne room at Whitespire and Quentin was fine, he was fucking _fine_ , and he would have kept being fine if Eliot hadn’t brought back to life shit long buried, shit he had as good as _told_ Quentin to bury, and for once in his miserable useless life Quentin _had_ , so why does it feel like his body is a house haunted by a ghost that never wanted to live there?

Why does it still hurt? It’s been months by now since they even spoke. Why does it hurt and hurt and hurt and no matter what he does it never hurts any less and why does it hurt like violence, like drowning, like it’s weighing him down and choking his throat and filling his lungs, like he can’t get enough air, his useless body can’t even fucking breathe, his lungs are burning and he can’t breathe —

Halfway through his sixth interval he stops. Hunches over, panting. He should — keep moving, but he’s not going to. And if he’s not going to, plan B is go back to the house and get stoned into harmlessness, place his brain in a hazy cloud for safekeeping and spend a couple hours listening to an ambient noise loop while eating pretzels and when he starts coming down he’ll be in a better mood and someone might be around to suggest a movie or an outing or else he can try to make a block of wood look like a frog or he can write _The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog_ until the lines are steady and the spaces are even or he could worst comes to worst just do some more weed.

But he’s not going to do that, either.

It feels like gravity, walking to the convenience store to buy as much beer as he can carry home because as much as he wants to be fucked up out of his mind as soon as possible he also wants to feel as gross as possible doing it. Like he’s been trying to achieve escape velocity, accumulate enough momentum to leave this planet behind at last, but he couldn’t do it and now he’s falling back down. Because it’s always here, unchanged and unchangeable, the landscape he can’t let go of that won’t let go of him no matter what he does: the same unforgiving ground beneath him, waiting for him to crash.

*

— his eyes his smile the curl of his hair after the rain his face beaming at the little boy like you could see his actual heart shining out of him the steady and familiar rhythms of his magic and his elegant fingers when he cast his voice singing clear and lovely lullabies ostensibly for the kid but really for the both of them a ritual of such comforting grace it seemed almost mystical on a still autumn evening when they slept outdoors the blue-black of the sky and its stars in alien designs and the twin moons pearly and bright and his voice drifting into the sky, reaching for the heavens like the twist of a flame, this warm and beautiful thing keeping them safe against the night —

It doesn’t matter, it never happened, it wasn’t fucking them. It’s been gone so long in so many ways. What is it that won’t stop lingering so far beyond the end?

*

There’s a knock on his bedroom door. Quentin aggressively does not want to talk to or be seen by whoever it is, but he has exited his bedroom for a cumulative total of maybe ninety minutes in the past three days, all under cover of darkness, so it is entirely possible that if he ignores the person at the door, they will come in anyway to see if he is dead. “Come in,” he says, voice croaking from disuse.

Luisa opens the door, lightly leans against the frame. “Hey, buddy.” She says this in the tone of voice you might use to try to lure back a cat about to get run over by a truck.

“Hi,” Quentin says. He’s sitting on the floor in the same stupid shorts he was running in three days ago, leaning against his bed with a half-empty beer bottle in his hand, and he’s not about to jump to his feet but he can’t make himself look her in the eye.

“You weren’t at book club on Wednesday,” Luisa says. “And I thought we were going to work on magic stuff some more yesterday, but you didn’t show. _Then_ I got a text from _Julia_ this morning that you weren’t responding to her texts…”

Of course. Quentin leans his head back and closes his eyes. “Sorry. I — I’ll text her. And I’m sorry for — bailing.”

“I’m not like, mad,” Luisa says. “I just wanted to check, like — are you okay?”

She looks around the room, and Quentin follows her gaze: empty bottles lined up by the back wall he hasn’t bothered to throw away, take-out refuse overflowing the trash bin by the desk which is sized to hold the occasional discarded envelope or pile of pencil shavings, used container gathering a gas station’s worth of cigarettes, empty Pringles tubes and bags of Chips Ahoy.

“You know what’s fucking stupid?” he says. “Like, almost hilariously idiotic? I was really about to say, yeah! I’m fine. Like I really thought for a second that might be a plausible answer, in this circumstance. God.”

She gives him a sympathetic smile. “You want to talk about it?”

Quentin barks a bitter laugh. “It’s a _long_ fucking story.”

“I’ve got time,” she says softly.

“I…” He’s about to say that he does not want to talk about it, nothing personal just he’d rather cut his own tongue out than so much as think about it ever again, which is sort of what he’s spent the past three days doing, metaphorically, but actually now that the possibility has been presented to himself, he finds that he kind of does. It is petty and pointless and probably at this point borderline qualifies as self-harm, but yeah: he wants to explain to someone who hasn’t heard any of this story exactly how Eliot Waugh ruined his fucking life. “Okay,” he says. Wincing he adds, “I should probably warn you that it might not smell… great in here.”

Luisa wrinkles her nose and does something with her thumbs, and the room fills with a light floral scent. “There we go.” She smiles and comes to sit beside him on the floor.

Quentin looks at the bottle in his hand. “I should probably put this down, right?” Not that half a bottle of beer particularly matters to his state of overall drunkenness, but like. As a matter of principle, or politeness.

“Here, let me?” she says, taking out of his hand. She kind of shakes it from side to side, tutting a complicated sequence with her other hand, and hands it back to him. “Now it’s water.”

“Thanks.” He takes a drink, trying not to think about how bad his head is going to hurt in a couple of hours; it’s cold, which he appreciates. “So — I don’t even know where to start,” he says. “That’s like, half the problem, is that this whole thing — it’s so fucking long, and it’s attached to everything, it’s like my entire adult life is wrapped up in this fucking like, Shelob’s web of idiocy and drama — it’s — okay, so you know how I mentioned I’ve been to Fillory?”

“Is this about Fillory?” Luisa asks.

“No,” Quentin says, then shakes his head because — “Or, like, yes? But not — see this is what I mean, is it’s all —” Everything, every nightmarish fucked up insane thing of his life for the past five years, all of it enmeshed and knotted thick, and all of it tracing right back to the day he met Eliot Waugh on the Brakebills lawn. Which — if she’s going to get the full picture, he guesses there’s no better place to start. He takes a drink of water because he forgot it wasn’t beer anymore, and then he begins. “So almost five years ago, I got into Brakebills, and like, basically as soon as I did, weird shit started happening…”

He tells her as little as he can for her to make sense of what he actually wants to talk about, but it still takes a while: the dramatis personae, the encroach of the Beast, Jane Chatwin’s time loops. Fillory for real, its splendor and its horror, the blade and the High King’s Crown. The Wellspring and the fickleness of Ember; Umber in hiding, the death of the gods. The end of magic — “Sorry about that, by the way,” he says, and eyes by now permanently goggling she says “Uh, seems like it was really not on you” — and then: the quest. The book, their destiny, the seven fucking keys. Eliot suddenly in the cottage, the sight of him like water in the desert; their aborted step through the door, Margo’s bizarre explanation. And then — and then —

— the throne room at Whitespire; the letter he’d never written, unmistakably in his own hand. Peaches and plums. All of it flooding back: fifty years of tiles and toil, sorrow and sweetness, loneliness and love. Fifty years of — of marriage and grief and parenthood and work, of agony and joy, family and selfhood. The beauty of all fucking life: the terror and the miracle of it. Fifty years and Eliot was there for all of it: fifty years of life that were fifty years of sharing a bed and a home and their two sorry hearts.

“I mean we were —” Quentin rakes a hand through his hair. “I don’t even know what to call it. Partners, best friends, boyfriends, fucking _husbands_ , family — all of the above. And I — I loved him that whole time, you know? Honestly —” He swallows, works to keep his voice steady. “Honestly once we had these — these memories we shouldn’t have had, these memories that never happened — I mean it was so weird and huge and overwhelming to just _get_ that, all at once, but it was also, like — oh, duh. Like, yeah, that’s what this was, that’s what I was feeling, watching him walk into the cottage at Brakebills when I didn’t know when I’d ever see him again. I was — I mean maybe not _in love_ in love, it had been a really emotionally complicated year for me, but — I was into him, for sure. On the way, without realizing it. And as soon as I did realize it, I mean, forget it. I was all the way there. So —” He rolls his eyes; this is the worst part to tell. “So I — I mean, it was crazy, and I knew it was crazy when I was doing it, and I think if I’d just like, waited a day to calm down I would have come to my senses, but — basically I, I asked if he wanted to like, try again. Or — pick up where we left off, or — see, there’s not even a way to say it that makes sense, because the whole thing is so bizarre —”

“Wait,” Luisa says, “I don’t get it. What’s the crazy part?”

“The crazy part,” Quentin says, “is me — you know, thinking that — that just because we had this weird experience together in a shack in the woods that we technically didn’t even have —” _Just because_ , says some bitter voice inside him, _just because you had fifty fucking years_ — “that that meant anything about — us, out in the real world.”

“Can I — sorry, I just want make sure I’m following,” Luisa says, holding out a hand to indicate a pause. “So — like did you ask him to go move back in with you in a shack in the woods?”

Quentin looks at her, startled. “What? No, of course not.”

“Oh,” Luisa says. “Okay, because I thought — I mean, _that_ would be crazy, for sure. Although also, pretty forgivable in the moment, I think, given the total mindfuck going on. But that’s not — you didn’t ask that.”

“No,” Quentin says, confused. What is she not getting?

“So what did…” Luisa’s furrowing her brow. “Like from what you’re saying, it sounds kind of like you just — asked him out. Or — told him you were into him?”

“I — not exactly,” Quentin says, because: neither, actually. He had done neither of those things. Not that it would have mattered. “It was more like — like I thought that we worked, you know? As a — couple, or whatever. Because we remembered working, together, so — so why not give it a shot?” The back of his neck burns with embarrassment, remembering: _Why the fuck not?_ “Which, again, was insane.”

Luisa is still frowning at him like she’s trying not to argue but doesn’t quite buy it. “But… why?”

“Because,” Quentin says, trying not to get frustrated when she’s being really a very good listener, “because — I mean, obviously —”

“Like, sorry,” she interrupts, “maybe you and I are just really different about this, but — okay, if I got stuck with Nico on an alien planet in another time in a single room for fifty years, would I at some point start having sex with him out of desperation? Like, maybe. We’re all mammals. But I also feel one hundred percent confident in saying that at the end of it, if we got to hit a reset, you could not pay me enough to consider doing any part of that again. I would need to maintain a six foot buffer from him for a year, just to stop feeling itchy about it. So — for _me_ , I just feel like, if I had fifty years’ worth of that, with someone, and I was not so sick of them I wanted a vacation from their life? I don’t know, I don’t think it would feel crazy to me to think that that might be a sign.”

“But it’s a totally different circumstance,” Quentin protests. “It’s — it’s a world that’s just him and me, no one else really knows where we come from or how we think, we can’t go anywhere or do anything —”

“But wouldn’t that make it _harder_?” she says. “God, the first time I lived with a boyfriend we broke up six months after I moved in because I was just fucking sick of seeing his face all the time, and we still had, like, jobs and other friends and shit. If we’d had to stick around… I don’t know _what_ would have happened, but it would not have been pretty.”

“Sure,” Quentin says, “but like — I mean, look, just trust me, Eliot and I are totally different people, in a situation where we didn’t _have_ to learn to put up with each other we would drive each other nuts, and — and it was just crazy. It never would have worked out.”

“Okay,” she says. There’s some lingering doubt in her voice, but clearly she wants to hear the rest of the story. “So — what did he say?”

Quentin shrugs. “He said — basically that. I mean, he didn’t — he was pretty nice about it, all things considered. Just — you know, pointed out that we weren’t exactly thinking straight, and that — those other versions of us, that wasn’t the real us, not — not in a world where we had options.” _You have to know..._ Quentin pushes the image away. That’s not the point here. “So then the next key was in, um, do you remember the part in, I think it’s in _The Silent Sea_ , where they talk about that place in Fillory where it’s always night? So I —”

“Wait, hold on,” Luisa says, briefly closing her eyes. “I’m really sorry to keep interrupting, and obviously, yes, I remember the Abyss, and want to know what the fuck went down there, but — I’m sorry, is that _all_ he said?”

“Uh,” Quentin says, “yes?”

“Holy shit, dude.” She blows a breath out through her lips, stirring her bangs. “This is your ex, right? The telekinetic? No wonder your magic’s fucked up.”

“Yeah, that’s him, but —” Quentin frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, that’s _all_ he gave you?” she says. “After fifty fucking _years_? Of _course_ you were pissed.”

“Well, but we didn’t _actually_ date for fifty years, we just — remembered that we did,” he says. “And he — he was right, so. You know, it’s not like — there wasn’t a lot more to talk about after that. It’s not like he — owed me something more.”

Luisa lifts a skeptical eyebrow. “Wow. You are a… _way_ nicer person than I am.”

“I doubt that,” he says wryly.

“Seriously,” she insists, “a guy dumped me once over text, and I threw a brick through his window.”

He can’t help but laugh at that. “Wait, really?”

She laughs, too. “Yeah. 2015 was a fucked up year for me. But, you know — that one, I can’t say I regret. The asshole dumped me over fucking _text!_ After _eight months!_ He’d met my _dad!_ And he thought he could end it with a fucking text message?” She shakes her head. “I can’t imagine what I would have done after — five years, much less fucking _fifty_. Set his house on fire, maybe. Kidnapped his dog.”

“Well that’s — kind of amazing, I admit,” Quentin says. “But I — no, honestly, you know, that part I handled pretty well, actually. Like maybe it stung, in the moment, but I didn’t — I was okay. I had, I had closure, and I was moving on, and we were friends. It was only…”

He’s about to say what he’s been saying to himself for the past six months: it was only later that things got fucked up. Eliot was his friend, just like before, and that was fine. Quentin was done clawing at people who had already made clear what they wanted from him. Looking back he was a fuck-up in a lot of ways still, but that one thing he’d managed to get through his own thick skull; in this if nothing else, he’d managed to grow the hell up. Eliot had turned him down and Quentin had done the mature thing and put his ravenous maw of feeling to the side where it could shrivel up and die from neglect, and it had. And _then_ , for reasons he still cannot fathom but can only assume have to do with weird possession trauma and guilt about his death, Eliot had seen fit to dredge up the whole embarrassing mess again, when Quentin had been so goddamn careful not to ask for one molecule beyond what was freely given, and _that’s_ when. That’s when the shock and the dissonance and the insistence on resurrecting a life Quentin had so thoroughly abandoned had smacked him like a blow to the already shaky head, and something inside of him had snapped. Except —

 _You have to know that that’s not me. And that’s definitely not you. Not when_ —

— except he can’t keep telling the story, suddenly; he can’t go on to the next scene. He’s stuck in the throne room, hearing a soft-voiced argument that goes _I know you_ and _we work_ , hearing again and again _why the fuck not_ , louder and louder like he never said it that day, his own voice screaming _why not, Eliot, why the fuck not_ , shouting _you do know me, you know me like I’ve never let anyone know me, so why are you pretending like you don’t?_ And when he tries to shift, he’s on the Muntjac in the Abyss and his malevolent reflection is saying _You got your best friend sexually assaulted_ and is saying _You killed her and she is never coming back_ and is saying _Eliot saw the best you had to offer and he couldn’t get rid of you fast enough_ ; he’s at the cottage saying goodbye to Julia and thinking _now there’s no one left whose life would change if you were gone_ ; he’s at Blackspire bewildered and enraged that Eliot didn’t want to keep him but won’t let him go.

He’s watching a monster with Eliot’s face kill someone and he’s sick with the blood and the violence and the miserable part of his brain that refuses to stop knowing Eliot’s eyes are beautiful even when they’re no longer his. He’s feeling the monster’s heavy warmth against him nauseated because his body remembers what this weight used to mean. He’s in the park watching Eliot speak with Eliot’s mouth barely processing what he’s saying because Eliot’s alive and the world is in color again and after that every time he looks at the body the monster has stolen he thinks _I would die for you_ and _I would kill for you_ and _I would do anything for you and you don’t even want to know_. He’s watching Eliot bleed out on the ground and convincing himself already that it will hurt too much to let himself hope so it’s good he’s learned to put such things aside and then he’s walking into the Seam —

Quentin remembers himself at Whitespire, maybe crazy and definitely in love, his heart swollen like an overripe fruit Eliot crushed unthinkingly beneath his heel, and in the year after, all the reasons he found to be alone and all the ways he tried to die; he looks at the year since he came back from death, the ruin he’s made of his life and how he kept destroying it even after he tried to run away. What lingered after the part that had come after, and lingers still. He looks at himself in the bedroom in the house on the bay, the clothes he’s been wearing for three dismal days, the mess like a toppled monument to his own misery, everything he keeps trying to fill himself up with that will never be enough. And he says — “Oh my god.”

Gently Luisa says, “What is it?”

“All this time — All this _fucking_ time…” He shakes his head, disbelieving. “I’m a fucking idiot. I’m the dumbest asshole ever to live.”

She makes a little pout. “Aw, hey. Why do you say that?”

“Because —”

His curls falling into his face, bouncing when he laughed. His hand warm and steady on the small of Quentin’s back. The way he kissed like kissing Quentin was the only thing it had ever occurred to him to want. His voice in the throne room saying, _That’s not me_.

“Because he broke my heart,” Quentin says, voice cracking, “and I didn’t even fucking know.”


	4. Chapter 4

The first time Quentin had sex with Eliot — the first time that counted, which never actually happened — it went mostly according to plan. Quentin had thought _We’re stuck here_ and he had thought _I want to_ and he had thought _Why the fuck not_? A year side-by-side on a preindustrial planet had forced the kind of intimacy that made the rejection of a tipsy advance seem minor on the grand scale of petty embarrassments. And Eliot would be nice about it, anyway. That much Quentin knew. It was part of why he felt so safe.

He hadn’t thought _I’m in love_ ; that was the other reason he felt safe. He loved Eliot deeply and apparently tirelessly and above all easily — so easily it never occurred to him to wonder if his feelings had started to slip beyond their familiar bounds. Falling in love felt like the fairy tale about the little mermaid, the original Danish story, not the heteronormative Disney bullshit: like you were walking on knives, bleeding out with every step. Being with Eliot was nothing like that. If Quentin tried and nothing came of it, or if something started and fell apart, he would survive.

So he kissed Eliot, like a question or an invitation, and Eliot kissed him back, like a _sure, okay_ ; and they fooled around on the blanket under the firelight and the stars with a kind of unhurried eagerness which later, like decades later, both of them would admit had made them think of the teenage make-out sessions neither of them had actually had; and they peeled off each other’s clothes, laughing a little at themselves, giddy with drink and desire and with the novelty of being touched like this in a world where it had seemed impossible; and they had jerked each other off, nothing special, Eliot having offered that first year at Brakebills to teach Quentin the spell for getting things nice and wet because he wanted to see Quentin stammer and blush, and Quentin having accepted the offer because he didn’t want Eliot to think he was a prude. It had felt good, to kiss someone skilled with his tongue, to feel someone else’s longing pressing itself through long fingers and a hot soft mouth along his skin, to come, frankly, into someone else’s hand — as good as he’d expected, or even better. Afterwards Quentin felt sleepy and content and pleased with himself, too.

Then Eliot lifted his hand to Quentin’s face, and Quentin thought he was going to kiss him again; but instead he brushed this one strand of hair that wouldn’t stay back out of Quentin’s face, a curiously familiar motion even though he’d never done it. Almost as though he’d thought of doing it before, but stopped himself every time. He’d brushed the hair out of Quentin’s face and rested his hand gently against Quentin’s ear and his face had made this soft small smile Quentin had never seen, private and sweet and almost shy, a whole new Eliot beneath the one Quentin already knew. It had lasted only a moment before his features rearranged themselves into something sardonic and smug, one dark brow arching devastatingly as he moved forward with teasing innuendo, but it was enough. Enough to feel a dark twist in his gut and a skip in his pulse and the sharp edge of a longing he hadn’t known was there, a burn like the fires lighting the torches, quick and hungry and beautiful and dangerous. Enough that Quentin could see — horribly, obviously — what he’d done to himself.

Quentin had thought: _Oh, I’m screwed_. And from that moment on, he had been.

*

Quentin had thought it was bad, hating Eliot for refusing to leave well enough alone, but this is… _so_ much worse. It’s so much worse, to feel abandoned with everything he’d ever had to offer; it’s so much worse to know that it had only ever been as simple as being unwanted, and he’d been too stupid to figure it out. It’s so much worse to feel that ache like a torn-off limb fresh as the day it happened, because some part of him had known in the moment he’d never get over it and hurried to hide it before he could know it was there. Like he’d built a shoddy dam to hold back his feelings, and finally the foundation has split and he’s been caught in the flood, flattened under the weight of his discarded love.

He cleans his room, kind of, out of shame; he stops eating there, mostly because he is never hungry and everything tastes like sand. He puts in the occasional appearance downstairs and engages in the conversations that arise, feeling like his own voice is a transmission he’s watching from somewhere in outer space. Sometimes he’ll venture towards the beach to feel sorry for himself in different surroundings. Luisa invites him to do things and gives him sad understanding smiles when he does not do them. Mostly he stays in his room and drinks. He knows it won’t make him feel better, but that’s kind of the appeal. He doesn’t go out, and he doesn’t do anything stupider than that, and he doesn’t even get the kind of frantic, mind-obliterating drunk he’s become very, perhaps overly, some might say addictively, familiar with; mostly it’s a constant soft-focus wooziness, tightrope-walking that spot where the world around him blurs into meaninglessness while everything inside turns neon bright, where nothing matters except whatever your heart’s latched on to so you’d better hope it’s good. It’s not good, but that’s also kind of appeal. Quentin isn’t drinking to forget; he can’t, anymore. There’s nowhere left to run away to.

*

One time before there was anyone else Eliot had fucked him slowly, agonizingly slowly, on hands and knees from behind, and it was like time had dilated, like everything had stopped and all that existed was Eliot behind him, dripping sweat on his back, cock huge and thick and steadily commanding the scene, hands possessive and sure at his hips, and Quentin’s own body, taken apart or else correctly assembled for the first time in his life or else finally revealed as after all simply an instrument for feeling good and good and good, so good he could hardly stand it, issuing these rough half-grunted cries from somewhere deep in his throat, coming at last in Eliot’s merciful hand to the sounds of Eliot’s rough greedy orgasm, coming like a goddamn concussion, and afterwards they had curled up together, damp and exhausted and lightheaded from pleasure, and Quentin had wanted to say _I wasn’t thinking about anything, El, not one single thing except this, do you know what that fucking means to me? To me?_ , but they didn’t say those kinds of things, wouldn’t for a long time, so he hadn’t; but Eliot had picked up his hand, lightly, and laid one very soft kiss on each of his knuckles, and then given him a startlingly innocent grin, and that had felt like enough.

Once, Quentin got sick, very sick, sick enough that Arielle insisted on sending for a healer because mostly she trusted them when they promised their future Earth science was valid but she was too unsettled by his fever to listen to his insistence that it was almost definitely a virus and anyway antibiotics hadn't been invented so either way there was nothing to be done except rest and fluids, and while she was out he had lain in the bed shivering and coughing and sweating and trying to fall asleep and he had heard with eyes closed Eliot’s voice, a few feet away, that perfect and pure gentleness he always used with Teddy, _Daddy’s sick, but he’ll get better. You’ve been sick, haven’t you? Adults don’t get sick as often as kids do, but it still happens and he’ll be okay._ And Teddy had asked, _Aren’t you going to sing to him?_ Because when Teddy was sick, Eliot always sang; probably by now he had decided it had medicinal properties. And Eliot had laughed and said, _Oh, I think Daddy’s sleeping, we don’t want to wake him up_ , but Teddy, agitated by Quentin’s illness, had insisted, and Quentin had croaked, _It’s okay, Daddy can’t really sleep_ , and opened his aching eyes; and Eliot had moved a chair to sit near to the bed, Teddy still small enough to press against his chest, and he had thought for a moment and then begun to sing, _The book of love is long and boring; and no one can lift the damn thing…_ , even though he didn’t like the Magnetic Fields, because he thought they didn’t “slap,” but that had been the song, the one song Quentin had sung badly and out of key the nights he’d been the one to lift the baby into his arms when he cried, and Quentin hadn’t even known Eliot had ever heard him, much less that he’d listened enough to learn it, but he had. Then a month later Arielle had gotten sick, and she hadn’t gotten better, and when the noxious grief of dust had first started to clear Quentin had watched Eliot, drawing with Teddy in chalk on the ground, laughing as he tried to follow the kid’s hazy directions, and remembered that night, and thought: Well, okay. I’ll read to him, and Eliot will sing to him, and he’ll be okay.

 _I’m sorry it took me so long_ , Eliot had said, _to figure it out_ , and Quentin had asked, _To figure what out?_ Arielle had been dead six years; they had recently decided Teddy was old enough to walk by himself when he wanted to play with the innkeeper’s children in the village down the river. Eliot had brushed a strand of hair out of his face. _Us, I guess — that I loved you, but also that — the things that were actually possible, if I_ … The finest of fine lines had started appearing around Eliot’s mouth and between his brows; Quentin looked at them sometimes and thought how stupid it was that anyone acted like it made a person less beautiful to look like they’d survived. _Sometimes I just look back and it seems so easy in retrospect,_ Eliot had said, not quite looking Quentin in the eye; _like why was I making it all so — complicated and dramatic and —_ And Quentin had tilted his head and pressed a kiss to his cheek and said, only slightly teasing, _Because you’re a complicated dramatic person. Everything looks easy in retrospect, El; when we finally figure this thing out, we’re going to feel so stupid it took us so long._ Eliot had smiled, not quite appeased, and Quentin had said, _It’s good now, right?_ And he had known: with every cell in his body he had known that between them, everything was. And Eliot had kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him; and Eliot had said, _Yeah. It’s good_ ; and Eliot had kissed him some more.

 _That’s not me_ , Eliot had said, and Quentin wants to ask him: Which part, asshole? Show me exactly where you lied to me. Tell me which parts were too good to be fucking true.

*

Quentin thinks about calling Eliot to tell him that he is the worst and most despicable person in the whole entire world because he’s right the fuck back to not giving a single fuck about his feelings, but he thinks that when Eliot picks up he might just start sobbing and begging _Please please please please take me back_ , so he doesn’t.

Quentin thinks that at some point he is going to have to do something other than lie on the couch or on his bed or on the floor drinking wine and listening to Maps on repeat, but he really fucking doesn’t want to, so he doesn’t.

Quentin thinks: I would have done anything, you dick. Any fucking thing for you, anything you wanted. Quentin thinks: You made me feel like I could do anything. You made me feel like I could be happy, did you ever have any idea what that fucking meant? Quentin thinks: I cut out my heart and buried it in the dirt for you, and you thought I could just put it back in its place because you snapped your fingers and said you’d changed your mind? It doesn’t work like that, genius. Quentin thinks: Fifty years. Fifty years I gave you everything I had and I know, I fucking _know_ you liked it, because I was goddamn there, and it wasn’t enough for you. Quentin thinks: Fifty years, and you didn’t even want to try. Quentin thinks: Want me, want me, why didn’t you fucking want me? After everything, how the fuck was I not enough?

Eliot filling the house with spring blossoms, Eliot experimenting with the spices for his beef stew. The house filled with the scent of something good cooking, his magic adjusting the heat of the fire. Eliot dragging Quentin to the nearest tavern every now and again because they were on a quest for the beauty of all life but sometimes he needed his own life too; Eliot pulling him up on his two left feet until he was laughing, dancing clumsily and happily to the strains of the inexplicably beloved bagpipe player. The sight of him when Quentin looked up, on his knees; his voice, his perfect voice. Eliot insisting they mark a special occasion the day Teddy lifted a plate he wasn’t touching; Eliot sitting down at the table where Quentin was working Teddy through Popper Seventeen and when Quentin asked what he needed he said, _I just wanted to watch my two favorite boys doing magic_.

Quentin thinks: come back, come back, come back. Quentin thinks: fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Quentin thinks: _oh say say say oh say say say oh say say say oh say say say —_

*

He sits on the beach drinking in the rain, chilly enough to feel almost like an actual autumn, because he feels like shit and he wants a setting to match. It feels cosmically right to sit in the wet sand getting drenched, hair sticking to his face and his neck, feeling like shit — like maybe he will spend his whole life feeling like someone is gouging his lungs out with a melon baller, but at least he’s acting like their relationship mattered. Like if Eliot gets to move the fuck on with a life in the world, Quentin has to be his fucked up Dorian Gray portrait withering in the shadows.

_Wait — they don’t love you like I love you…_

“Little magician,” says a familiar voice at his side.

Quentin startles, looking up. “Oh. Hey, Edine.”

The selkie smiles down at him, her red curls still dry even as rain bounces off them. She’s wearing her sealskin today wrapped around her almost like a toga, which should not be geometrically possible. “No ill-conceived diving today?”

Quentin shakes his head. “Nope. Just sitting.” Objectively probably it counts as some kind of progress on the self-or-others danger scale that he can sit on the beach in the rain hating himself and his life without nearly killing himself yet again. Probably a week ago he would have given a shit.

“Ah,” says Edine, like he’s actually explained himself. She sits herself next to him, back very straight. At some point since she showed up it’s stopped raining above them. “You seem melancholy.”

“You could say that,” Quentin says. Understatement of the millennium.

She leans in. “Do you desire a round of fornication?”

Quentin shudders involuntarily. “No I’m — I’m good, thanks.” His sex drive has shriveled up and died; the idea of so much as touching someone makes him want to encase himself in ice. He can’t imagine wanting to have sex with anyone ever again. Even bizarre magical creature sex that feels more like running your body through a car wash. He doesn’t want her to take it personally, so he adds, “I’m kind of… melancholy… about a guy. And I sort of already tried, uh, fornicating the pain away, but it didn’t — it didn’t really make it better, so.”

“Ohh,” Edine breathes, her big eyes blinking sadly. “A lost love.”

Quentin’s throat tightens. “Yeah.”

She asks, “Did he at last consent to marry his lady betrothed for the honor of his ancestral house and the continuation of his line which was the line of his father and the line of his father’s father before him?”

“What?” Quentin says. “No, nothing like that.”

“Did he leap from the mast of a ship in a maelstrom driven mad by desire and believing he had seen your shape beneath the waves only to plunge to his death in the icy depths below inhospitable for even the ablest swimmers among humankind?”

“I wish.”

“Did the lord of his country announce war on the region across the southern border for the spoils of spices and precious ore and entice all hardy young men with the promise of land after victory such that your beloved rode his horse into ignoble battle only to meet his death on another man’s spear?”

“Definitely not — wait, did those things all happen to you?”

She gives him a smile that’s somehow both tearful and mischievous. “We live a long time, little magician. My clan is well-versed in the paths of the endings of love.”

Sure. That’s — okay. “It wasn’t anything that dramatic,” Quentin says. “I just — wanted to keep going, and he didn’t want to anymore.”

Edine wilts a little, like this is more crushing than any of her options. Maybe to her it is. Maybe no one has ever dumped a selkie because he just wasn’t feeling it. “Would you like a song, to hear on the wind the voice of your sorrow?”

Quentin does not really care, but she seems so depressed by his situation that she’s desperate to help, and it’s not like he has anything better to do. “Sure. That’d be great, Edine. Thanks.”

Her emerald eyes sparkle. “I shall sing to you a song of your people.”

“Cool — oh,” Quentin says, as she reaches out to guide his head against her — so his cheek is smushed against her breasts, like anatomically, but spiritually he has very much the sensation of resting against a _bosom_. It’s a bosom-y intent. The sealskin is soft and warm against his skin.

She starts out with a whistle, a reedy melody lifting upwards and curling into a trill; it sounds familiar. “Wait, I feel like I know this song.”

“Oh yes,” she says excitedly. “I am told it is quite beloved among your kind.”

“Oh, okay.” Quentin wonders what she thinks of as his kind. Humans? Magicians? Men? Californians? Despondent alcoholics who can't swim?

Edine whistles again, moving forward into the song that Quentin still can’t quite place; then she starts with her weird husky grunge-rock voice to sing clear and full of pathos, “ _Every night, in my dreams…_ ”

Quentin almost bursts into laughter. He’s sopping wet and half drunk on the beach in the rain that isn’t raining on him, a year out from coming back to life after fucking killing himself and depressed out of his mind about of all the goddamn problems in his life a _guy_ , pressed against the tits of a magical creature from the Scottish Isles, and she is singing to him My Heart Will fucking Go On, because selkies are big fans apparently of Celine Dion. This might be the dumbest and most absurd his life has ever been, which is saying a lot. Except then she sings —

— _love was when I loved you_ —

— and, haha, so funny, now he is… crying? He is crying, to the dumbass power ballad from _Titanic_? A movie where two people fuck inside a car even though there’s no way a car would have been transported on an ocean liner in 1912? Quentin is crying really, really hard, because somehow, buried in the idiot marshmallow center of this schmaltz marathon written to pander to Oscar voters which relates to real music the way that Hershey’s Kisses relate to real chocolate, is something that resembles an actual truth. Because — fucking, fuck his stupid life — love was when — when Quentin looked at Eliot and remembered suddenly that everything in his life was better because Eliot was there. When Quentin sat an entire afternoon alone with his thoughts with Eliot alone with his thoughts a few feet away and when one of them spoke they smiled like they’d just returned from a long journey. When Eliot laughed and Quentin laughed with the happiness of having seen it. And now that’s over and he is crying to this terrible song thinking: love fucking _was_ when I loved you, asshole, and now it’s gone. By the end of the song, _my heart will go on_ feels less like a promise than a threat — on, and on, and on, and on, each beat as painful as the last.

When she finishes, Edine pats his hair, somewhere between maternally and like a kid with a doll, while Quentin sniffles and wipes his face and tries to calm the fuck down. “It’s a wonderful song, isn’t it,” she says, almost reverently.

“Yeah it’s — it’s pretty good,” Quentin says, although, like, come on. Unexpected shoreline breakdowns aside, there are way better songs out there _even if_ your thing is schmaltzy power ballads that won Oscars. Like, if Edine thinks this is cool, Up Where We Belong would probably blow her mind.

Edine releases him and he sits up, stretching his neck. “Our songs are magnificent,” she says, a little wistfully, “but I confess — for some forms of the craft, those who walk the land excel.”

“Oh yeah?” Quentin says. “Like what?”

“Oh — like heartbreak,” she says, in a dreamy tone. “Humans are experts at heartbreak.”

Quentin nods, a heaviness in his chest that feels like it will never leave. “Yeah, we’re pretty good at that.”

*

This weird thing happens after that where he can’t — _stop_ crying. Not literally, it’s not like some dawn-to-dusk weeping curse, but it’s like — Taco Tuesday at the house, Quentin remembers that he has eaten tacos with Eliot in the past, and now he’s excusing himself to his bedroom to cry. Listening to Maps, still, only now every time he hears _my kind’s your kind_ he starts crying and has to pause the music until he stops, and then he starts it over and the whole thing happens again. He walks on the beach and thinks that he’s never been to the beach with Eliot and he starts crying; he lies in bed and remembers that Eliot has lain in bed and cries. Crying drunk, crying sober; pouring himself a drink and remembering Eliot pouring him a drink at the cottage, at Whitespire, in the little house in the woods, and starting to cry too hard to keep drinking, crying until his pillowcase is soaked and his stomach hurts and he’s passing out from exhaustion, which. That’s one way to cut back. Waking up in the morning, head aching from the crying instead of from the hangover which does not in the moment feel like an improvement, rinsing his face and brushing his teeth and seeing his reflection and knowing he’s looking at a face Eliot will never again touch — crying. Like there was some volcano of crying inside him building pressure, and motherfucking Celine Dion set it to blow, and now it just won’t fucking stop.

 _Celine Dion_. Fuck his stupid life.

Julia calls him while he is lying on his bed staring into space sort of wanting to be drunk but lacking the will for the steps to make that happen. He sends it to voice mail and she calls back immediately and he picks up this time, because double-calling is a sure sign things are on the way to Very Concerned territory so he needs to give her some metaphorical face time or else actions will be taken, and he doesn’t want her feeling like she needs to take action. “Hey Jules,” he says, trying for cheerful or at least neutral. “What’s up? How’s New York?”

“It’s pretty good,” she says, so normally no one else would have any idea she’d definitely been five more rings away from running to California like he’d been kidnapped and she had the ransom. “The weather’s been nice the past week — sunny but just cool enough to feel like fall, you know? How have you been doing?”

“Same old, same old,” Quentin says. Or starts to say, but as soon as he opens his mouth — yep, crying. Not like a soft gentle weeping he can disguise over the phone by keeping it quiet and only speaking in short sentences. Big dumb little kid with a skinned knee crying.

“Hey,” Julia says, all care, which makes him cry harder, because his brain sucks, “what’s going on, Q?”

“I’m fine,” he gasps idiotically, “I’m — really, Jules, I —” He doesn’t know what he wants to tell her he is, but it doesn’t matter because he’s crying too hard to talk.

She listens to him sob his guts out for a little while, which is probably nice of her but feels very bad. “Did something… are you…”

“I’m not,” he says immediately, and then figures he may as well name the depressing elephant in the room she’s trying to find a way to politely gesture to. “I’m not going to kill myself — I’m, uh. I’m pretty sure about that.” He actually is pretty sure — if that were on the table, he thinks he would have walked back into the ocean that day on the beach, plus he honestly thinks at this point if he tried anything he would start crying too hard to carry it out — but he’s not sure how convincing it is without bringing up the fact that he almost drowned himself three weeks after they said goodbye, which would probably not be reassuring. So he takes a deep breath and forces himself to add, “It’s just, uh — um, I don’t know, the whole thing with — with Eliot —”

Saying his name dissolves him right back into tears; Julia’s sympathetic little “Oh, Q,” doesn’t help.

“It’s dumb,” he says when he can form words again. “I mean it’s — you know, it’s been, what, two and half years since we — but it’s like, it’s like I thought I was over him, you know? Like I was so sure — but uh, um — it turns out maybe — maybe I wasn’t —”

“Yeah,” Julia says, soft and unsurprised.

“So I don’t — I don’t know why,” he says, “I mean it’s so fucking stupid, but that’s just been, like —” 

“It hurts,” she says. “That’s not stupid, Q.”

He thinks it might be, but he doesn’t say anything, because he’s crying, because she’s right about this much: it hurts. It hurts and hurts and hurts and fucking hurts. On and on and on.

She listens to him a moment longer, then says, “Q — what if I came out there to hang out with you a couple days?”

“What?” Quentin says, distraught. “No — no, Julia, you don’t have to do that. I really — I mean I’m, I’m moping about my ex, but I’m not — I can send you texts, like, every couple hours, if you want — if you’re worried that —”

“It’s not that,” Julia says. “I — I trust you.” There’s the slightest hesitation in her voice when she says it, not like she doesn’t mean it, but like it’s a choice she’s making in the moment rather than an ongoing truth, which — Quentin doesn’t know what to do with that, right now. “But — you’re my friend, and you’re upset. You don’t have to go through this alone.”

“I’m an idiot, and I’m — overreacting,” Quentin says, guilt burning up his guts, “and this is really, it’s so, so nice of you, Jules, but you don’t — like, I can’t ask you to just drop everything to, to take care of me,” dropping his gaze to the floor even though she’s not there for him to avoid her eyes, “just because I’m — bummed about something that doesn’t even matter anymore.”

He’s expecting her to argue with him, because they’ve argued about this in the past, but instead she says, “Do you remember Thanksgiving break freshman year?”

“Uh,” he says, startled, “what about it?”

“Think for a moment,” she says wryly. “I think you can get it.”

“Thanksgiving break — _oh_ ,” Quentin says, remembering. “Jacob Petersen?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Julia says. “Jacob fucking Petersen.” Jacob fucking Petersen was Julia’s boyfriend, spring semester of twelfth grade until — well, until Thanksgiving freshman year. Then he had — “Jacob Petersen who came home from Oberlin, fucked me twice, _then_ dumped me and told me I should probably get tested soon, because he didn’t _believe_ in monogamy anymore.”

“God, what a dick,” Quentin says, briefly distracted from his own boy problems by the ancient grudge.

“Yeah,” Julia says. “And it was like — some part of me knew, you know? Everyone says, don’t do long-distance, just quit while you’re ahead and start college free. But I felt like, I’d done the smart thing enough to get into Columbia — I’d earned a freebie, on being the mature one, and I really liked him. And then… that. And he _was_ a dick, and frankly he was terrible in bed, but I was devastated. I felt so stupid, and so awful, and so betrayed. But I didn’t have to feel any of that alone, because you were there for me, the whole time.”

Quentin remembers: Julia a mess, crying harder than he’d ever seen her, cursing Jacob out and missing his voice, throwing up in the bathroom sink at her mom’s apartment while he held her hair back and rubbed between her shoulder blades. Sobbing into her couch cushions while he held her hand.

“So what if you don’t — what if you don’t think of it like, this is something about… like I’m taking care of you,” Julia says. “What if you just think of it like, someone broke my best friend’s heart, and I want to be there for him, the way he always was for me when someone broke mine? Just a couple days. Fogg is actually sending me to an admin conference this weekend to hear about how other schools are thinking about access, so — if it makes you feel better, I can promise that I won’t cancel on that. But what if you just let me come over and — and let me hold your hand?”

“I…” It still feels like he’s letting himself off the hook, somehow, admitting he actually can’t meaningfully stand on his own two feet. “I mean, that’s really sweet of you, Jules…”

“I’ll watch _Harold and Maude_ with you,” she says, “and I won’t even complain about how depressing it is.”

“Okay, it’s _not_ depressing,” he says, “it’s life-affirming —”

“Am I coming over?” she asks.

“I — yeah,” he says, like he’s conceding, and then as soon as he’s agreed he feels ashamed. “Thank you, Jules. That’s — it actually would be great to see you.”

“Then I have nothing else to say about it,” she says brightly. “I’m gonna wrap up a few errands here and see when one of the Pennys has a chance to hop me over, but I should be there by this evening, okay?”

“Okay,” he says. “I love you, Jules.”

“I love you too, Q,” she says, and hangs up.

*

Julia coming over means that he basically _has_ to shower (rinsing off under the waterfall a few miles north once they’d figured out the cryomancy to get it tolerably warm, laughing naked and giddy with the easy innocent touch of skin to wet skin: crying), so that’s — a plus, probably. She finds him in his room, lying on his bed and staring into space, but not smelling of anything stronger than shampoo and deodorant and wearing clothes without any visible stains.

She greets him by holding up a grocery bag. “I brought ice cream.”

“I dunno,” he says, “I feel like the only good thing about this is that I’ve lost like five pounds because I don’t want to eat.”

Julia rolls her eyes and comes to sit on the edge of the bed. “Your line was, _Thank you, Julia, best friend in the universe, for not only bringing me ice cream, but remembering my favorite flavor_. And throughout history, people across the world have had traditions and rituals for periods of mourning and transition, because those things help us move on. Eating ice cream while watching a depressing movie is our cultural inheritance.”

“It’s not depressing,” Quentin says, forcing himself upright and swinging his legs down so he’s sitting beside her. “Is it really Phish Food?”

“Who do you think I am?” she says, handing him a spoon.

He takes it and obediently repeats, “Thank you, Julia, best friend in the universe, for not only bringing me ice cream, but remembering my favorite flavor.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, smiling. “Let’s get this over with.”

They eat the ice cream and watch the movie, which is not depressing but does make Quentin cry. It’s nice to have an excuse to cry that isn’t wholly about something idiotic like, _Eliot also likes movies_. Julia might be on to something re: the ritual, here. Eliot would one thousand percent hate this movie, which is a bonus.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she says, once he’s dried his eyes for the eight hundredth time today.

Quentin shrugs. “What is there to talk about?”

Julia raises an eyebrow. “That’s never stopped you before.”

“I wanted more, and he didn’t,” Quentin says, voice — fucking breaking _again_ , god, he’s going to blow out his tear ducts. “He didn’t want me, Jules,” he hears himself saying, small and petulant and childish, “fifty fucking years and he didn’t want me, he didn’t even want to fucking _try_.”

“Yeah,” Julia says, scooting close, and she takes his hand and he lets himself lean against her shoulder and squeeze her hand and cry, and it — sucks, but is also nice. It’s confusing. But better than doing it alone.

When he’s calmed down and straightened up again, Julia asks, “Do you think — Q, have you considered talking to him about it? I mean — he and I are friends, but we kind of have an unspoken policy about not talking about — your stuff, in that way, so I’m not — holding back any intel here, but… just based on what I’ve heard from you, I got the vibe that door wasn’t exactly closed.”

“Yeah, well,” Quentin mutters. “That was before I welded it fucking shut.”

“I don’t know,” Julia says. “You guys have been through a lot — I feel like if he felt the way you said he felt, I don’t know that a couple months of you freaking out would have changed things so completely. I mean, maybe — but maybe not. Maybe there’s a chance it’s not over.”

Quentin doesn’t say anything for a long time. He’s trying to picture it, calling Eliot to talk, and saying… what? “I think it is over, though. For _me_.” He shakes his head. “God, that’s the fucked up thing — I miss him like crazy, and I’m so — it hurts so fucking much, all the time, that it’s over, but when I really think about it — I don’t actually _want_ to get back together. It’s too — I loved him like crazy, Jules, I was so fucking in love with him, and that’s — I remember that. I remember how it felt, and that’s… not how I feel anymore. And I don’t know how much is that, you know, maybe I kind of do feel like, sorry, you don’t get a fucking do-over on telling me my love wasn’t good enough, and maybe that’s petty of me or whatever but I can’t just — _not_ feel that way — and then there’s the fact that that person, the Quentin who was in love like that, he fucking died, and I’m not — I don’t know how much of whoever I am now is ever going to be who he was. I don’t know how much I _can_ be.”

“I get that,” Julia says.

“But then why,” he says, pushing his hair back in irritation, “like, if I don’t actually _want_ him anymore, why am I so fucked up about it, two and a half years later? Like what the fuck is wrong with me that I just — somehow I still, still, _still_ can’t let it go, that I wanted something he didn’t? And why now, when things were actually — kind of going okay? I thought I was — not doing great, or anything, but — coping or whatever, starting to, and it turns out — I can’t even cope with getting fucking dumped.”

Julia tilts her head, considering, and smiles. “You know, when you’d been back maybe a month, I started having these dreams about James.”

Quentin looks at her. “About _James_?”

“I know.” She laughs, shaking her head. “It was the weirdest fucking thing. All kinds of dreams. Dreams where we were back together, dreams where we’d never broken up, dreams that were otherwise just typical dream-logic shit but he was there. In one I was at Brakebills re-taking a math test I got a B-plus on in tenth grade, and he was proctoring the exam and I couldn’t tell if he didn’t remember me or if he was faking it to avoid letting on that he had, like, a conflict of interest? But — constant. Every night, without fail.”

“That’s bizarre,” Quentin says. “You never said anything.”

Julia quirks her mouth. “You didn’t exactly seem like you were in a place to have these big emotional conversations about my subconscious.”

Quentin remembers what Alice said, about what he’d been like back in New York; he makes himself for a second remember those months directly, blurry and ugly, how he’d been barely living through them, and ducks his head. “I’m sorry about that.”

“I know,” Julia says, giving his shoulder a friendly nudge. “So yeah, it was super weird. I kept waking up feeling like it must have _meant_ something, like my brain was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t figure out what. At one point I reactivated Facebook just to stalk him.” Quentin raises an eyebrow at this distinctly un-Julia-like behavior, and she shrugs. “He’s engaged, obviously. To someone he met in B-school, equally obviously.”

“That… sounds like James,” Quentin says. A nice, normal guy who wanted nice, normal things, and had never seemed to have trouble getting them.

“It sure does,” Julia says. “She seems nice, based on the Instagram account I scrolled _way_ too far through. Very into nail art, and her dog. It’s a cute dog, to be fair. A Corgi.”

“Damn,” Quentin says. “Did you — like did you miss him, looking at — at his life now?”

Julia presses her lips together, thinking. “No — that’s not how I would describe it. And I wasn’t even missing — whatever, the life I had, or the person I was back then. All those things I was so sure I wanted. As fucked as the past couple years have been, they’ve taught me a lot about who I really am. I wouldn’t give that up, for the life I was building at twenty-two.”

“So what was it?” Quentin asks.

“Eventually I realized it was just —” Julia spreads her upturned palm, like she’s offering the memory to the universe. “I’d broken up with someone that at the time I really thought might be the love of my life, and things had been so crazy at the time I hadn’t even had time to — feel that. I spent years just hopping from crisis to crisis, trying to survive, and now things had slowed down, and it turned out somewhere inside me was a twenty-two-year-old who had never loved someone like that before, and never would again. Not because it was like, the grand love affair of my life, but because — you know, whoever I meet in the future, whatever we have, we won’t be two kids convinced they’re adults who have it all figured out. That was over. And I needed to say goodbye to it.” She looks at Quentin, tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. “You said you were doing okay — maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s not that you can’t cope, but that you _were_ coping, and that’s why — there was room for something else.”

“Maybe,” Quentin says. He doesn’t find this particularly convincing. “So what did you do?”

She shrugs. “Eventually I just let myself — feel it. I listened to a lot of Ani Difranco and watched _Titanic_.” Quentin makes a face, and she flicks his arm. “I let Penny buy me a round and ate some overpriced cupcakes with Kady and got really into kickboxing for a while, and it — I could feel it passing through me, until it didn’t need to. And then I wasn’t carrying around this thing anymore that I hadn’t even realized I was still carrying, that had stuck around after something else was gone.”

Quentin slips his hands into hers, feels her curl her fingers through his. “I really am sorry I couldn’t be there for you.”

“You were there for all the other ones,” she says, leaning her head against his shoulder. “And you’re here now.”

*

Julia stays for a couple of days, through the end of the week. They eat burgers and tacos and ice cream and watch _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ and _Ghost_ and _Once_ and _Never Let Me Go_ and then because Julia insists fucking _Titanic_ and Quentin cries at all of them, even the stupid boat movie which among other crimes is at least forty-five minutes too long.

“Jack completely could have fit on that door,” he says to Julia as the credits roll, irritated with his own reaction.

She purses her lips. “I’m not having this argument with you again.”

“Like if she had really cared the way she said she cared,” Quentin goes on, “she could have sucked it up and made room, and it would have been harder, but he would have lived. And whatever, I get that it’s a high-stress situation and maybe she wasn’t thinking straight, but you can’t let him drown and then ask us to believe decades later that he was the love of her life. And then, what, she sees him in the afterlife but he’s like twenty, because _that’s how old he was when he fucking died_ , and we’re supposed to think it’s heartwarming? Because she’s reunited with her lost love, even though it’s her fucking fault he died?”

“Are we talking about _Titanic_?” Julia says. “I feel like maybe we’re not talking about _Titanic_.”

“What, you think this is some kind of projection metaphor?” Quentin says. “Like I’m Jack, and Eliot is Rose, and the door is me being like, _hey asshole, our fifty-year relationship actually fucking meant something to me_ , and her I’ll-never-let-go bullshit is him being like, I totally love you as a friend, and the last shot is Eliot deciding we should get back together once I’d fucking died?”

Julia presses her mouth into a line and raises her eyebrows in annoyingly eloquent silence.

“Whatever,” Quentin says. Because: fine. Maybe a little bit he does feel like he was holding on for dear life, and Eliot tried to act like he was doing him a favor while watching Quentin sink into the icy depths. “ _Be that as it may_ — he could have fit on the door.”

“But that’s not what the movie’s _about_ ,” Julia says, rolling her eyes like she can’t believe that against her better judgment she is in fact having this argument with him again. “It’s not a documentary about how this ship sank and everyone died. It’s about — grandeur and romance and _wanting_ things and figuring out who you are and tragedy and living life, and Leonardo DiCaprio being really, really hot. It’s a movie about _feelings_. It _is_ dumb, kind of, but that’s because it’s not talking to your brain. It’s talking to your heart. If you try to pick apart every little thing looking for the ways it makes perfect logical sense, you’re missing the point. The heart doesn’t work like that. And we both know I’m the brainiest bitch there is, but sometimes you have to turn the brain off for a bit and let the heart do its thing.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “I see what you’re doing, Jules, and it’s pretty good, but I absolutely refuse to learn a meaningful life lesson from fucking _Titanic_.”

She laughs. “Suit yourself.”

But he’s already thinking: love was when I loved you. “Eliot loves this stupid movie.”

“Yeah,” Julia says. “That tracks.”

He leans against her shoulder, the familiar crook there. “Okay. I think I’m ready to watch something that’s not going to make me cry.”

So they watch _Kiss Kiss Bang Bang_ , and for two hours it almost feels easy to breathe.

*

They finish watching _Brokeback Mountain_ late at night on her last day there and once he stops bawling his eyes out Quentin should probably suggest they get to bed before they fall asleep in their clothes lying where they are. Instead when he can talk again he says, “It’s not just the break-up, you know? It’s what he fucking said.”

“Yeah?” Julia says.

“Like if he had just said, _I don’t want to be with you anymore_ ,” Quentin goes on, “that would have sucked, but it would have been — I don’t know, straightforward? Not a fucking douchebag move? But instead he pulled this _that’s not me_ crap, like nothing there actually mattered to him. When _he’s_ the one who had just decided it happened, for whatever definition of the word _happened_. How the fuck was I supposed to react?”

“God, I don’t know,” Julia says. “I would have been — I can’t imagine. Knowing me, probably borderline homicidal.”

“And _then_ to say that wasn’t fucking _me_ ,” Quentin says, “like he knows me better than I do — like what the fuck?”

“It was a dick thing to say,” Julia says.

Quentin should find her sympathy validating, at least, but he doesn’t. He curls and uncurls his fingers at his side. The moonlight is dim through the open blinds. “But what if it wasn’t?”

Julia lifts her head to look straight at him. “It totally was.”

“Or —” Quentin shakes his head. “Yeah, he was being a dick, but wasn’t he also kind of right? I mean…” He swallows. “That _wasn’t_ me. I’m not — look, we both know I’m not some like, count your blessings, emotionally stable guy. I’m not —” He can’t quite bring himself to say _happy_. “And I — I _was_ , over there, or back then, or whatever, but — but that’s not me, Quentin. That’s who I _could_ be — because of Eliot. Because I had him, and he — made me better. And without that — without him — I mean clearly I haven't been… Like, what if that was….” He can't bring himself to finish: what if that was my only chance?

Julia takes a deep breath through her nose, studying him. “No, you’re not that guy,” she says. “And you weren’t, that day when the two of you walked through the clock — or almost walked through the clock, or — whatever.”

“Thank you,” he mutters, even though she’s agreeing with him, “that’s very encouraging.”

“Let me finish,” she says. “I’m going somewhere with this, okay? So let’s say you’re right. You became, over there, this other person. This — however you want to think of it, stabler, happier, less fucked up version of you.” Of course she heard the thing he couldn’t say. “You were over there a long time. Had all of that happened by the time you were twenty-seven? Was twenty-seven-year-old Quentin Coldwater over there chilling and counting his blessings and feeling — I don’t know, content?”

“Fifty years all at once kind of blurs together,” Quentin says. “I don’t…” But then he remembers: his twenty-seventh birthday. Eliot had sent him out on some errand Quentin couldn’t understand the urgency of and can’t even recall now, and he’d come back to the house irritated because it had taken longer than he’d expected and they’d basically lost a day of work, only to find Eliot, who had been the one to decide they should start keeping track of days like the calendar they’d grown up with meant anything anymore, standing above a birthday spread, some small gift wrapped carefully in cloth and a sweet little Popper-variant spelling out HAPPY BIRTHDAY Q in sparkling blue and a fucking _cake_ that he’d _baked_ which must have been why he needed Quentin gone so long, and Quentin had burst into tears, because they’d been fucking for a year and he didn’t understand how or why Eliot could take all the time and effort necessary to do this and yet they could not have one real conversation about what they were to each other or what they wanted to be or how they felt. Eliot’s face had fallen which had made Quentin feel worse because he couldn’t square the notion that Eliot was fucking him as a convenient good time with these moments where Eliot seemed to give a shit about the person whose heart he was constantly bruising, but he couldn’t say that because the whole thing was that they weren’t overthinking it and they certainly weren’t talking about it, about _them_ , god forbid Quentin feel like he might want to be a _them_ with the person he lived with and worked with and had sex with all the fucking time, so he’d told Eliot he was crying because he missed his dad and everyone else, and then he’d felt guilty because obviously he did but in reality no at this moment missing his dad and his best friend and even his mom and everyone else he’d ever known didn’t feel as horrible as the fact that Eliot would remember his birthday and bake him a cake and suck his dick but wouldn’t call him his boyfriend. To distract himself from the guilt, he’d picked a fight by accusing Eliot basically of loving people less than he did, of wasting a day baking some stupid cake because he didn’t give a shit if they ever solved this godforsaken puzzle and went back to his fucked up life, Quentin’s pretty sure he’d called him _heartless_ , which was horrible but also how Quentin felt about everything Eliot was doing to him that he wasn’t fucking allowed to name. Then he’d stormed off to take a walk in the woods and he had sworn there, absolutely sworn, that when he got back he would once and for all tell Eliot that they needed to fucking define things because maybe it was needy and clingy and uncool but Quentin was a needy and clingy and uncool person and having outrageously hot sex with his friend he was pretty sure he was falling in love with was making him completely insane, only when he’d returned the house had been empty and when Eliot came in a few minutes later and stood behind him and set a tentative hand at his waist, Quentin had given in, instantly, and they’d had outrageously hot sex and then fed each other cake in bed, and the cake had been idiotically good, and when Eliot fell asleep shortly after Quentin sat up in the bed crying trying to stay quiet enough that he wouldn’t wake up. So —

“I don’t know, I guess maybe it was kind of a process,” he says. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying maybe it was Eliot,” Julia says. “But maybe it wasn’t _just_ Eliot. Maybe it was also your wife, and becoming a dad, and having years of a life that wasn’t explosion after explosion, and the fucking opium air, and — time. Age.”

Quentin huffs a sardonic laugh. “You’re saying maybe I just finally, _finally_ grew the fuck up?”

Julia gives him a smile that looks a little sad behind the eyes. “I’m saying maybe you _grew_. Like everyone does. And maybe it wasn’t about some magic bullet, this _one thing_ that made it possible, but about all these things together that let you live a life that gave you time and space to grow. And those things were important, and beautiful, and they mattered — but that doesn’t mean they were the only way to get you from who you were at twenty-four to who you became in the literal _decades_ after that. Maybe there are other things, that you can still find.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, not comforted. “Maybe I’ll figure out what those are if I ever manage to stop fucking crying about my dumb ex-boyfriend.”

She squints at him in the dark. “Can I tell you something you’re going to hate?”

“If you have to.”

“I don’t have to,” she says. “But I think it’s important and you should hear it.”

“Ugh,” he says. “Fiiine. You can be a good friend, _I guess_ , if you really want.”

“I know it sucks,” Julia says, “and I know it hurts, but I think this is good for you.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Really? You think I’m like, making healthy choices here? Lying down and crying about my ex twenty-four/seven?”

“Kind of?” She wrinkles her nose. “Yeah. I think I do. I think — you’ve been holding on to this for so long, and it’s so big. It makes sense to me that it would take you some time to let it go.”

“Maybe,” Quentin says, unconvinced.

“And I think,” she says, cozying up against his side, “Q, I spent months trying to get you to have a real conversation with me, or even just to admit something was wrong. Months watching you do anything else but say, _hey, I’m not okay_. So — I know this feels awful, for you, and maybe you don’t feel any better than you did then. But from my vantage point, it looks really different. And it feels like something that’s been overdue for a long time.”

Quentin’s throat tightens. “I’m really sorry, Jules.”

“You don’t have to keep apologizing,” she says gently. “That’s not why I said that.”

“I know, I just —” He doesn’t know what to do with it, except be sorry.

“I know,” she says, and kisses his cheek.

*

When Julia’s gone, he walks along the beach, thinking about what she said. Not her unfounded optimism in his psychological potential; that seems to fall patently under “sweet but misguided.” But the other stuff. Quentin can’t shake the image of Julia — Julia _Wicker_ — Instagram-creeping on some MBA because she was fixating on a guy she hadn’t spoken to in years. It sounds too much like something he would do to feel plausible as something she would do. But apparently she did.

He’s felt so stupid — this whole time he’s felt so stupid, about how deeply he was hurt and how all this time later he’s still the walking wounded. He always fucking does this, wants too much and holds on too hard, blows up minor shit into catastrophes. He always breaks too easily, and bleeds too long.

But maybe Julia has a point, about what it takes to move on from fifty years. What it would take — maybe not anyone, Eliot seems to have moved on just fine, long-simmering secret love or no, but — what it might not be solely his own deficits and pathologies needing a while to find a way to live with, after losing something so huge and so bright. Maybe, hideously, she’s even right that it doesn’t matter if Jack could have fit on that stupid door; what matters is that everyone watching that dumb movie knows what it feels like, to keep holding on after you’ve had to let go.

_Love was when I loved you._

Quentin looks out at the ocean, a rich green-blue under the sun, and thinks: what would it be like, to drop his love and his anger and his grief into the sea? To release his white-knuckled grip on the story that he was fine, or that he should be fine, to stop explaining and arguing and just — let gravity do its work. He wonders if it would be right, if that’s what he needs, like Julia says; he wonders if he’s just looking for another excuse to give up. He wonders if it’s denial to keep fighting with himself every time he can’t ignore how he feels, or if it’s escapism to wallow in his heartache without even trying to clear a pathway through. He wonders what’s running and what’s opening his eyes and he wonders again how he’ll ever fucking know, which of his thoughts are the right ones and which are new disguises for the same old stories that he’s trapped himself with again and again.

He thinks: The worst thing that can happen is that I die.

He thinks: I loved him so much it was crazy. I loved him like breathing, like dying. I loved him like I could have burst from it, and he threw that away.

Quentin watches the waves and he listens to the pulse of his heart going on and he thinks: if this were going to kill me, I’d be already dead.

*

So Quentin keeps crying. He cries on the beach and he cries in the shower and he cries in his bed, falling asleep alone, and again in the mornings, waking up from a dream he can’t remember that left him with the image of Eliot’s eyes and his smile and their old palpable joy that won’t ever exist like that again. He watches _Y tu mama tambien_ with Cynthia and _Call Me By Your Name_ with Luisa and _Grave of the Fireflies_ with Nico and _Casablanca_ with everyone and he cries because they’re beautiful and he cries because they’re sad and he cries because once Eliot held his hand while they took Teddy into town on a market day. He watches _Harold and Maude_ again, by himself, and he cries because it _is_ depressing and it _is_ life-affirming and it feels like he could split open, feeling both of those at once. He watches _The Empire Strikes Back_ , a movie he could recite in his sleep, and he cries because he’s never noticed how much in the end it’s a film about having to live after something that makes life feel impossible. He cries on the back porch looking out at the bay just thinking about these movies, the fact that they exist, little two-hour doses of proof that always someone is hurting like they’ve been eviscerated alive and someone else knows how that feels.

Humans are experts at heartbreak.

It doesn’t make him feel better and it doesn’t bring him closer to the person he thought he was starting to remember how to be, who did things and wanted things and felt things that were not just this endless gravitational sorrow, but it doesn’t kill him, either. He sits in some surprisingly decent vegan ice cream place with Luisa running through the highlights of his other life and the lowlights of their relationship since and she very kindly acts like this is not unbelievably boring to listen to. He finally uses his library card to take out the book of _Never Let Me Go_ and rereads it for the first time since high school in long morose stretches on the back porch, sinking into the mundanity of its bleakness, the weird plain-spoken elegance of its unarticulated grief. He mostly feels too wrung-out and exhausted to bother drinking about it but sometimes he picks up a bottle of red wine to pretend he feels self-indulgently sad instead of inescapably sad for a little while. He makes a playlist of only the sad Taylor Swift songs, which are all the best ones anyway, and he listens to it feeling the same leftover defensive embarrassment he always does when he’s listening to Taylor Swift but thinking: I was there, I was there, I was there.

There: resting his head against Eliot’s chest, listening to his heartbeat beneath the skin, Eliot’s arm curled lazily around his side, not talking because nothing needed to be said. Laughing so hard at some goofy in-joke that they forgot for a while that they had lost everything, everything they’d ever had, except each other. Waking up in the bed they shared to the sight of Eliot letting their son “help” with breakfast, mostly by standing on a stepstool and watching and answering a triumphant _yes!_ when Eliot asked _Does that look ready to you?_ , and Quentin just watched them for a moment, caught in the realization that for the first time since childhood he couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted to die. Sitting under a tree in the resplendent Fillorian fall, listening to Teddy make up a convoluted and fantastical story about dragons and giant birds and _magicians, like us_ , nodding and gasping and hiding a smile at the hilariously detailed questions Eliot kept managing to come up with on the spot which Teddy boldly improvised incoherent answers to with aplomb. Raking leaves in red and orange, conceding after much encouragement that fine, the kid could jump in some piles, just for a bit. Choking up around their hearth because years after they’d started to teach him the alphabet, years of scrambling for memories of their own barely-remembered first-grade classes in the time before they’d finally thought belatedly to seek families in walking distance to befriend, Quentin had written some shoddy Dr. Seuss plagiarism on parchment, and after much practice Teddy was reading it, and when he saw Eliot was crying too he dissolved into tears.

It was so good, and there was so much of it, and now it’s gone.

Halfway through November he lies on his bed in the afternoon, debating whether to acquire a second bottle of wine or just take a nap. It’s been a while since he was this drunk during the day but it’s Eliot’s fucking birthday and Quentin saw no reason to maintain any kind of pretense that he was going to be able to handle that like a well-adjusted adult. He doesn’t go out for more wine, mostly because he doesn’t want to stand up, but he can’t fall asleep, either; when he closes his eyes it’s just the same neverending litany of memories he can’t revive or touch. Kissing like they were trying to devour each other the day they finally found some other children to send Teddy off with for the unfathomable luxury of entire hours at a time. Teddy’s wild splashes in the lake they’d swim in during the summers, and the first time they returned there when he was grown and moved away and it was just the two of them, older and grayer and worn, watching each other undress with a sly smile sparked by their fresh aloneness like time hadn’t moved. Meeting the woman who became Teddy’s wife; meeting their first grandchild, an impeccable ball of sweetness snoozing peacefully in a way Teddy never had as an infant, and remembering that first terrifying year of parenthood as he watched all over again the quiet steadiness of Eliot’s hands as he held this fragile life. The warmth creeping back into the world the first spring that Arielle was dead, and she and Eliot had always taken care of the garden before but now Quentin would have to learn, and Teddy was too young to occupy himself but luckily old enough to be curious about this mysterious ritual, so trying to channel his exuberant kindergarten teacher Quentin had told him about seeds, and soil, and how this tiny speck would become a tomato, a whole bunch of tomatoes, actually, if they took good care of it; and Teddy, eyes comically serious like a very small scholar wrestling with a difficult text, looked dubiously at the little seed and said, _Is it magic? Like you and Papa do?_ ; and Quentin had laughed, full of love, but then he had thought about it and said, _You know what, Teddy? It kind of is_ ; and Eliot, setting up a row of peppers a few feet away, had said, _Oh god, are we getting metaphorical this morning_ ; and Quentin had surreptitiously flipped him off and said to their son, _It’s a kind of nature magic, in a way — something so, so small that hides these big instructions for what it’s going to become — it’s like there’s magic inside here, and when we give it water and soil and sunlight and time, that’s the spell that lets it transform_ ; and Teddy had lost interest in the existential inquiry at that point, and set to work extremely carefully tucking the seeds in their bed; and Quentin had peeked over at Eliot, who was smiling softly saying _Okay, that one was pretty good_ ; and —

— holy shit.

“Holy shit,” Quentin says out loud, because — the bundle of instructions for a future that looks nothing like the past but is actually the same — the mechanism of unlocking a chamber that carries the full potential of the whole — there’s power in transformation — “Holy _shit_ ,” he says again, sitting up a little too fast, grabbing his phone to start typing on the Notes app because he can’t — he can’t see it all, yet, but he feels it, he _knows_ there’s something here — why is he typing with fucking thumbs, this is stupid, he needs his laptop — but no, he’s going to be working out — potential runic sequences and base arrangements and optimal values for _tau_ , that shit’s a pain on the ass on a computer, he needs — he needs — Jesus Christ, does he really not have in his current store of worldly possessions one single writing implement or piece of paper that’s not from his fucking middle school calligraphy kit? What is _wrong_ with him, he needs to get his shit together, come on, Quentin, this is absurd —

Before even realizing what he’s doing he’s scrambling down the hallway and knocking on Luisa’s door to see if she’s home.

“Come in,” says her cheerful voice.

He opens the door, possibly too hard. She looks up at him from where she’s reading on her bed, surprised to see him, no doubt, standing up and seeking out human companionship of his own volition. “Hey, Quentin. What’s up?”

“Can you give me a ride?” he says. “I mean — hi, um, you know, how are you, and all that —”

“I’m okay,” she says slowly, like she’s not sure whether to be amused or worried. “Are _you_ okay?”

“Yeah — yeah, I’m okay,” he says, laughing because, like, whatever, who the fuck cares if he’s _okay_ , when there’s — “I just, uh — so this is going to sound crazy, probably, and before you ask, yes I _am_ drunk right now and it _is_ my ex-boyfriend’s birthday, but that’s not — that’s actually not what this is about, and — I was just, I had this idea, and I need, I need to start figuring it out before I lose it — lose the idea, not lose my mind, although — anyway so I was thinking I need to get a notebook, but then I was picturing it and — and there’s a lot of moving parts here, I think, potentially, so I thought actually, like, if there’s a Staples or something we could get to, because I was thinking I could get like, a whiteboard, and maybe some index cards, set up some color-coding, and, uh — yeah, probably I, I could do that later, but it — it just kind of feels like an emergency, and I know, like I hear how that sounds insane, but, well, I am sort of an insane person, so —” He runs out of steam, no longer sure precisely what he’s trying to convince her of.

Luisa stares at him for a long moment, then sets down the magazine she’s been flipping through. “Yeah, why not. Let’s go see if the car is free. And — you know, maybe put some shoes on first.”

“Fuck — yes — thank you — and uh, good call on the shoes,” he says, because he absolutely would have forgotten, and runs back to his room to do just that.

*

There’s power in transformation. There are dozens of spells written for binding information or instructions or actual material in small spaces, and he’s not sure if any of them are what he needs but they suggest there’s a path there. There are whole branches of theory dedicated to tracing parallels between magic and biology, scholars working on channeling known similarities into more powerful spells, which could be new spells, which could be more complete spells, which could be — Jesus, his fluency with runes has gone to shit since leaving school, he’ll need a textbook to refresh, or — and the radial base could be made up of almost fucking anything, even once he identifies the properties he needs there will be — estimating five distinct properties, with five potentially suitable elements for each, which are lowball estimates for both, that’s five to the fifth which his calculator app says is 3,125, and yeah if he learned anything at Brakebills at _all_ he’ll be able to knock out some of those to start with, and probably more advanced books exist that will help him keep narrowing it down — and that’s not even getting into the extra-radial stays — shit, is this crazy? He doesn’t think it’s crazy — or, he thinks it might be crazy, but he _feels_ — he feels there’s _something_ there —

Quentin lists the set of runic systems he should start by reviewing on an index card, sticks it with a magnet to the corner of the whiteboard he’s walled off for things to do. Then he puts his shoes back on and heads to the convenience store for supplies.

*

“Quentin? Quentin.”

A hand nudges his shoulder and he straightens up with a jolt where he passed out sitting cross-legged on the floor against his bed. “I’m up. I’m awake.” 

“Hey,” Luisa whispers. “I got up for some water and saw your light was on. Why don’t you get yourself into bed?"

Quentin tries to blink himself into full consciousness. “No — no I’m, I’m good, I’m —”

“It’s late,” Luisa says. She’s wearing a robe, he notices; the house beyond his room is dark and silent. “I think you should sleep.”

He looks around at the detritus of the past three days: empty cans of sugar-free Red Bull, protein bar wrappers and wax paper that held sandwiches from a nearby deli in the trash can by the desk, crumpled notebook pages, index cards arranged in categories undeniably inscrutable to anyone but him. The whiteboard leaning against the closet door, covered with arrows and question marks and equations in his messy handwriting. “Okay, yeah — yeah, I just — I’ve been trying to diagram this scaffolding option for hours and I think, I think I’m almost there —”

“Do you usually make major breakthroughs at two in the morning?” Luisa asks gently. “Because if so, and this is part of your process, then by all means, have at it. But if not…” She gives a tilted smile. “It’ll still be here in the morning.”

Quentin takes a last scan of his surroundings: all this evidence of — of something. Something that might be nothing, but could be — something he’s been doing, and doing, and doing, for three straight days. “Yeah,” he says, lifting himself up slowly before sitting down on the bed, wincing a little at his stiffness. “Yeah, okay. Sorry. Thanks.”

“No worries,” she says, eyeing the whiteboard. “You’ll have to tell me what you’re doing at some point — it looks cool, but I can’t quite follow it.”

“Me neither,” Quentin says, “but I’m working on it.”

*

It’s almost like — so Julia was always better at math than he was. By a hair, but — he can admit that now. She had this seamlessness in the way concepts connected themselves in their mind, a fluidity to her thinking that he thinks of now when he watches her grace when she casts; looking back he can also see her tenacity, the way she’d wrestle with anything that didn’t make perfect sense to her until it was completely her own, while his own motivation to internalize theorems and formulas in a lasting way varied with his emotional state, which oscillated wildly then. But sometimes, working together on extra credit for honors precalc, finicky and unexpected probability problems and unintuitive geometric proofs — sometimes it would just _click_ , for him: where even if he couldn’t quite see the end yet, he knew all of a sudden that a solution was in him before he could say what it was, like the bits he needed were lit up and he could almost _feel_ the shape of it coalescing as he followed where they led; a _weird_ solution, typically, sometimes excessively laborious compared to the method the problem had been designed to elicit, sometimes an uncharacteristically elegant shortcut their teacher hadn’t considered, but one that worked, ugly or unusual though it may have been. Sometimes there would be a moment where he looked at what was in front of him and knew suddenly he could make it do what he needed it to do, maybe not in the way he was supposed to, but in a way that worked.

That’s what working on the spell kind of reminds him of. Eleventh grade study hall with Julia, or writing college papers at three in the morning when suddenly the frame of the thing fell neatly into place and after that he just had to transcribe his instincts until he figured out what he actually meant, or the moment at the Trials he realized Brakebills wanted them to cheat, or even standing in the illusion of the cottage looking for a key and being suddenly convinced he knew exactly what the quest wanted them to do — splicing together the facts that don’t obviously belong, finding the way through that’s not on any map. That’s what he’s good at; it might be the only thing he’s good at. That’s what he was supposed to do, in the version Penny told him, at the Seam, or what he would have done if he hadn’t been so obsessed with his misery and his righteousness both. Taking the pieces that don’t match, and seeing how he can make them fit.

It’s not much of a gift, but it’s his. Still is, whatever he can or can’t cast.

He’s not doing anything he’s ever seen done, but none of the component parts are that radical; it’s about the arrangement that will unite them, the frame on which he can weave the disparate threads together into a cohesive whole. And if sometimes, tearing up another page of calculations because he’s worked out it’s a dead end or pacing with a dry-erase marker between his teeth, trying to sort out the optimal _rho_ -differential, he feels delusionally grandiose for thinking he’s the one to figure that out, he reminds himself that he’s not doing anything that special.

It’s all magic. Just magic, in the end.

On Friday he hops on his bike and spends the day crossing the city to hit up what feels like every apothecary and hedge shop and magical supply store in San Diego, along with a flower shop at which he picks up some basic soil and a little terra cotta pot. The spell’s not ready yet, not anywhere near it; but he thinks he has the basic schema figured out, enough that a set of approximations and decent guesses, properly arranged, and a good-enough tutting sequence should be able to net him — something. Not a whole object, not anything that could reasonably be called a mending, but — Back at the house, he grinds the rose quartz with a mortar and pestle and an assist from Fitzhugh’s Pressurizer, he lights the oak-scented candle to burn a spring of dried holly, he marks out a simple runic skeleton across the pot. He makes a little bed of soil and stone and herbs, and he nestles in a tiny piece of a shattered plate, burying it under another — inch and a half? That seems like a good ballpark. Then he starts to cast.

If he’s wrong, like completely off the rails deluded, if there’s no potential in what he’s trying, the segments he’s assembled are too disjointed and loosely bound to have an effect. So if he comes back when the spell has run its course and digs up the shard and anything has changed — anything at _all_ —

He gets to the end of his spell sequence and — holds it, for a moment. Feeling the magic of its jagged edge, the live wire screaming _fix me, fix me, fix me_ , if you know how to listen for it.

 _I can’t fix you right now_ , Quentin thinks, irrationally, _but just — just go with it, okay? And maybe —_

He closes out with a last wingtip-cross, for good measure, and blows the candle out.

*

“So since whole point is to try to mend something without kinetic magic,” Quentin says at breakfast, “I’d been trying these different ways of essentially setting some kind of mending process in action, without the caster needing to guide it. Like a, a Rube Goldberg machine or something. You flick a switch, and that sends the ball rolling that hits the trampoline, or whatever, and at the end, something presses the button.”

“Uh huh,” Luisa says, peering at him over her mug of coffee.

“And that wasn’t really getting me anywhere,” he continues. “But then I thought — two things, kind of. One is that, we already have a blueprint for how to — how to take a part of something, and turn it into a whole. I mean, that’s what DNA is, right? The, the blueprint for life, these building blocks that you just need one tiny piece of to create an organism. And the other is — usually, as magicians, we’re thinking about harnessing power, or generating it, in order to achieve something. But it goes in the other direction, too. There’s power in transformation — when you cast, the spell sends out its own energy. That’s what residue is — that’s what —” He almost says _that’s what killed me_ , but it seems a little morbid for nine in the morning. “And — look, I’ll be honest, I barely know anything about residue theory, but I was thinking — if you could take _that_ — if you could, could gather up the essence of the whole object in a single piece, like DNA, and just — kickstart it, somehow, and set up a feedback loop to capture it so that that first effect is what powers the rest, almost like a, like a greenhouse, or a hall of mirrors, then — maybe —”

“Then you wouldn’t have to mend it,” Luisa says shrewdly, “because it would just — become what it was.”

“Exactly,” he says. He takes a bite of his toast, drums his fingers on the table. “Do I sound nuts?”

“It sounds _complicated_ ,” Luisa says. “But not nuts, no.”

“I — to actually get to where it needs to be, I’ll have to — well, look into residue theory, for starters,” he says, “and brush up on mineralogy — there’s a lot of — anyway. I set a kind of trial run last night, just to see if the basic concept has any validity at all, and if I’ve calculated right it’ll finish up sometime this evening, so. We’ll see then, if I’m onto something, or just — tilting at fucking windmills.”

He thinks it will be something. He wants it to be something. He wants —

The day is excruciating, like waiting for SAT scores and college admissions letters all at once. He is once again unbelievably sore from going from the average daily physical activity of a slug to spending dawn to dusk on a bike in search of materials, but he can’t sit still; he keeps peeking at the pot on his windowsill, even though the flagging mechanism he set has no reason to appear until everything else is done. He puts on his running shoes and goes for a jog, humbled quickly into starting from day one after weeks spent wallowing; he walks to a public library across town to return _Never Let Me Go_ , picking up _The Remains of the Day_ while he’s there because he remembers liking that one too, and walks back, feet aching by the end and somehow hours left to go. He gets sucked into a card game with Nico and plays fucking terribly because he can’t focus; he hangs around like everyone else for Toni’s vegan weekend spread and keeps running back to his room to check — and finally, after the flourless raspberry tart has been cut and served, when everyone is chatting sated and content while lingering over decaf or spiked seltzer or wine, he races one more time up the wooden stairs, noting not for the first time that that’s probably a more cardiovascularly challenging endeavor than it really ought to be, and he sees — a tiny blue blossom, signalling it’s time to see.

With trembling hands he plucks the flower out, sets it to the side; digs with his bare fingers into the mix of soil and mineral and shredded plants. He reaches something hard, and sharp, and larger than any of the grains he’d filled the pot with; he pulls it out, and —

— and there it is: the white ceramic shard, no longer quite a shard. Larger, definitively, thicker and wider, a solid little disc with edges that aren’t the place where it broke but little branches reaching out like coral. A white ceramic shard that was part of a plate, and that tried as hard as it could on the power and guidance Quentin gave it to become what it needed to be.

Quentin thinks he’s maybe never seen anything lovelier in his life.

He heads back downstairs, brandishing it like a talisman out of some legend, and slides back next to Luisa, palm outstretched.

“It worked?” she said, looking down at it with eyes wide.

“It worked,” he confirms, half-feeling like as he says it he’s going to wake up from this dream. “Or — I mean, obviously I have a long way to go before I get it to work for real, but — it’s a start.”

“The fuck is that?” Nico says amiably from across the table.

“This?” A grin bursts across Quentin’s face, and he starts to laugh, because — “It’s proof of fucking concept. That’s what the fuck it is.”

*

He feels turbocharged after that. Nuclear-powered, supersonic. He feels like he’s radiating energy from his goddamn pores.

The work left ahead of him to build the full spell is enough that some of the manic impatience of those first few days dissipates; now that he knows there’s something real to work towards, not just wishful thinking run amok, he can settle into the task knowing that it’s better to slow down enough to think clearly than to rush and increase his risk of overlooking something or fucking it up. He needs to flesh out his theoretical background; he needs to study up on runic sequences until he can manipulate them with confidence; he needs to do, _god_ , a _lot_ of reading up on potentially relevant compounds and their combinations; he needs — he needs to do a lot. But it doesn’t feel overwhelming. When he starts to feel dizzy with everything on the agenda, he thinks of that funny-shaped piece of white ceramic, sitting on his desk to remind him what’s possible, and inside him something hums a deep resonant _yes_.

In the mornings he wakes up and he has toast and he drinks coffee and he sits at his desk, organizing his thoughts, scratching out equations, looking up whatever he can on the handful of sites he knows to be reputable, mostly things he’s heard Julia mention or ones he knows are affiliated with Harriet somewhere on the back-end, making notes and connections and setting out the new questions that arise; he grabs a sandwich or a plate of leftovers to eat at his desk or with whoever’s around for lunch and keeps working until his eyes are crossing and his brain is too crowded with theory and symbols and ideas and images and inquiries to think straight, and then he stands up to see what else he can pour his energy into.

He starts running again, finally watching the videos about form ( _land with your feet beneath you_ — as opposed to fucking _where?_ ) Julia sent him, sucking it up and stretching his legs out when he makes back home. He comes back to the book club, and some casual chatter about what he’s up to leads to both a list of local places to search for magical texts and a collective excitement about choosing one of the foundational articles on residue theory as next week’s selection. He finishes _The Remains of the Day_ and goes on to _An Artist of the Floating World_ , which he’s never read; he looks up a bunch of pictures on the internet and gets a fresh block of wood and starts whittling away at it, carefully, trying to make it match what he sees in his head. He starts messing around with vernacular magic again, practicing pulling fire out of ambient until he can easily light the candle without tutting through it, fist-pumping in the privacy of his bedroom the first time. He writes out with his dip pen lists of spell components he might use, making himself laugh with how in that font they look like the item menu out of some old-school RPG. He asks Rishi if he could send him a journal article he doesn’t have access to, and Rishi emails him the PDF and a handful of others he thinks might be useful, depending on where Quentin’s taking this.

He’s taking this to the end, is where he’s taking this. He’s going to fix a fucking plate. And if he can fix a plate, he can fix the coffeemaker. And if he can fix the coffeemaker, he can — maybe —

*

“Fuck,” Quentin says, relaxing his hand. He’s in Luisa’s room, having tried for approximately the eight hundredth time to make the air smell like jacaranda; he was feeling confident after his success with the fire, but it turns out learning to make magic do something you’ve never used it to do is a whole other level of challenge. “Yeah, I still can’t — it’s like I can’t hone in on it, or — I don’t know. With the fire, now, I tune in and it’s _there_ , almost like it’s waiting for me, because I know what I’m looking for, and — and if I pay attention I can feel other — strands, or whatever, but I don’t — like I can’t connect any of them to what I’m trying to do. And when I reach in kind of blindly, it’s like — just static.” He shakes his head. “How does anyone who’s not a genius learn this kind of magic, if there’s nothing you can practice on the way?”

“Rude of you to assume I’m not a genius,” Luisa says with a wink, and he smiles, giving an apologetic nod. She purses her lips, considering more seriously. “It’s a good question, though — Cynthia mostly just wanted to try it out as a novelty; I didn’t teach her anything fresh. And pretty much anyone else I’ve taught something from this way was a SoCal hedge who was experienced enough that the process was — I don’t know, kind of intuitive, the way it is for me if I’m picking up something new. You don’t have to think about it, if you’re used to it, any more than you have to think about putting words in the right order in your first language, or about whether to lead with your left or your right for a tut sequence you’ve cast a million times — or, you have to think about it, because it’s new, and it takes time, and practice — sometimes a lot of time — but it’s not this like, constant recalibration. Your brain is just kind of wired that way.”

“So how did you learn it,” Quentin asks, “before you got wired that way?”

“Me?” She tilts her head, eyes narrowing. “Here, let’s try something. I’m going to — _almost_ cast it. I’ll start the spell and then I’m going to try to hold it, right before it goes active — and then see if you can find just what I’m doing. Don’t even think about the ambient — just focus on me.”

She holds her hands wide, making loose L’s with thumb and forefinger; Quentin tunes into the magic around him, trying to focus on the place where it’s — doing something.

“Oh,” he says, “oh yeah, that’s — I can see it, what you’re holding. Or — hear it, or — you know, whatever.”

“So now,” Luisa says, “hands like mine, let’s see if we can cast it — together, okay?”

Quentin mirrors her basic position, keeping his attention focused on the magic she’s channeling, trying to force his way in.

“Don’t — you don’t need to be that aggressive,” Luisa says. “It can be more like — an invitation, or a request.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, nodding; and tries to — shift. Tries to ask the magic to let him in; tries to invite it to use him, for what it can become if it’ll follow — the path he’s setting out, which he hadn’t realized he was setting out, but he’s mirroring her internally now too — and —

The room fills with the smell of jacaranda, and Quentin — knows he didn’t do that by himself, but he feels it, the familiar aftermath of casting; it was him, too.

Luisa sits back, smiling. “I should have thought of this earlier — when I was a kid, learning this shit with my mom, I never — she never just told me what to do, and watched me do it. It was something we did together. I think that’s what it is — that’s why tuts are so important if you’re learning magic from a book, or in a class; what you need to learn it like this, if you haven’t already built that relationship to magic, is someone to work you through it. It’s easiest to learn when you learn it collaboratively.” She holds out a cupped palm, gathering up the scent until it’s gone. “My hunch is, if we keep working it together, you’ll learn it well enough that you can do it alone.”

“Okay then,” Quentin says, making L-shapes with his hands. “Let’s go again.”

*

“I seriously thought the leprechauns were going to make us dance till we dropped unconscious with exhaustion,” Julia says. “Luckily Alice used to take step-dancing classes as a kid, so she was actually able to figure out what they were looking for in exchange for the cane, which the Baba Yaga liked enough once we handed it over, she said it could count for _two_ months instead of one.”

“ _Nice_ ,” Quentin says, and Julia laughs. “Hey — if I send you a spell draft, could you double check my meta-math?”

“Sure!” Julia, god bless her, sounds psyched. “Are you getting into spellcraft? That’s so cool.”

“Kind of?” Quentin says. “Or — yeah, I guess so. I don’t know, I was just thinking — my magic’s all fucked up, as you know, and I don’t know how to unfuck it, or if it’s ever going to get unfucked, but I thought — I thought I might be able to find a way to, to fix things anyway. Or fix — something, at least. Some way to — make something whole again, even if I can’t put it back the way it was. So — well, you’ll see. Just — any feedback you have would be great.”

“Of course,” she says. “You know, Alice is great with that kind of stuff. You might want to ask her to take a look, too.”

“I —” Alice _is_ great with this kind of stuff, but Quentin doesn’t exactly feel he’s entitled to ask her for anything at this point. “Yeah, maybe. I mean — well, you’ll have the spell, or what I have so far, so — you know, if you want to pass it on, and she has the time, maybe…”

“Sure thing.” He can hear the smile in her voice. “So how’s — you know. The other thing?”

“The other thing?” he echoes blankly. “What other thing?”

She gives half an uncertain laugh. “You know — how’ve you been feeling about — Eliot, and all of that.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, a quiet amazement dawning in him. “I —” He almost says he forgot, which sounds insane, but — but maybe he kind of did? Not like it was erased from his mind, but like — a shift in perspective: like he’s had something to look at that’s small, maybe, but it’s his, and it’s so close to the very center of him that he hasn’t been able to see past it. And now he’s thinking about Eliot again, and it — hurts, of course it still fucking hurts, of course there’s still that voice inside him shouting _you didn’t want me, why didn’t you fucking want me_ , like a wound that won’t stop bleeding. It doesn’t hurt — _less_ , exactly; it still feels, when he touches it, like it will always hurt the same. But it doesn’t feel like all of what he is anymore, either. It doesn’t feel like proof that hurting is all he was built to do.

“I’m okay,” he says finally. “Maybe you were right, you know, about — needing some time. It was rough, for a while, and it — kind of still is, I guess, but — I feel okay. More okay than I did.”

“I’m glad,” she says, and he feels himself smile as he says, and means it, “Yeah. Me too.”

*

December begins, a weird green warm December that doesn’t feel like December to him. Quentin tries to bloom the scent of jacaranda in the air occasionally on his own and sometimes he succeeds, although he can’t tell what’s different from the times he doesn’t. He goes to one of Luisa’s yoga classes because she really does seem to think it’ll help him get his bearings around this new way of doing magic, and it is without exception the _most_ annoying thing that has ever happened to him and the biggest workout he gets is nearly straining the muscles in his eyes from rolling them too hard every time the instructor tells them to feel the heartbeat of the earth or reach for the sky, but unfortunately he can see exactly what Luisa means about getting a different way to practice dropping in to what’s happening around him, so he grudgingly agrees he might go again, although he refuses to commit to buying a mat. He reads for his spell and he reads for book club and he reads for himself, occasionally, in quiet moments at the end of the day in bed or on the back porch, making his way through the novel or returning to the collection of poems: _Although I do not hope to turn again / Wavering between the profit and the loss / in this brief transit where dreams cross_ … 

He starts folding a set of brightly colored stars to place on the pink plastic Christmas tree Ray and Toni bring out as something between a joke and an extremely sincere December tradition. He finishes the Yoda puzzle and decides then and there that puzzles are not his goddamn thing. He fucks up the creature he’s whittling and thinks whittling might not be his thing either but he wants to get this done, so he finds some more wood and starts it over, paying meticulous attention to the places he fucked it up. He writes in black ink and fine, or attempting to be fine, lettering, _A spell by Quentin Coldwater_ , aspirationally, buzzing with the closeness of making it reality; then he looks at the piece of ceramic on his desk, the little white chunk of possibility, and he takes out the map of Fillory and slowly, setting a light pencil frame first and tracing the letters painstakingly and letting the ink dry completely before he erases the guide beneath, he writes in the empty space above Castle Whitespire:

_Domain of High King Margo the Destroyer_

_First Democratically Elected Ruler of Fillory_

_Long May She Reign_

He studies it when he’s done: it looks pretty good. It’ll make her laugh, he thinks, if — if. His life feels like a series of _if_ s right now, but he’s starting to feel like some of them might come to pass. He finds an envelope to store the map in, for safe-keeping.

*

“Your spell looks pretty good,” Alice says when she calls him after some texting back and forth to find a time they’d both be free. “There’s some gaps that I highlighted — mostly the places I think you already knew it wasn’t quite there yet — but the structure of it looks theoretically solid. I say theoretically because of course it’s a pretty unusual application of the concepts involved… there’s a lot of unknown interactions. I’d expect there to be some things you can only really ascertain through trial and error, especially for something more complicated.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Quentin says. He’s nervous, talking to her like this; he’s got headphones on so he can fold another couple stars while they talk, to do something with his hands. It feels like there’s something lying in wait for him to fuck up.

“I did catch a couple spots where — I wasn’t sure if you were calculating what you wanted to be calculating,” she says. “You’ll see that in the email — just some questions about whether those are really the values you want to be using.”

“Thanks,” he says, “that’s really helpful.”

“And I know you had a lot of question marks around materials — over at the New Library most of our operations are still suspended for the restructuring —”

“Yeah,” he interrupts, because the mention of it stirs some acute curiosity — god, it’s been so long since he knew anything about her life — “how’s that going?”

“Ugh, it’s a total bureaucratic nightmare, trying to balance the needs and politics and ideologies of the different stakeholders is like playing Jenga blindfolded in an earthquake, and that’s not even getting into the massive problems of the sheer logistics _,”_ she says, but she sounds when she says it as happy as Quentin’s ever heard her. He smiles to himself, anxiety dissipating in the face of how much he likes this person he’s known so long. “But, I mean. It’s not totally above-board, but I could send you a couple things that might be useful there — those big reference books of mineral properties, some of the more comprehensive herbals. Maybe a book or two about residue theory, also, since that’s something you’re working with.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, surprised and moved. “Yeah, I’d — I’d really appreciate that. He almost says, _You really don’t have to_ , but it seems insulting, almost. Alice fucking knows what she does or doesn’t have to do. He doesn’t understand why she wants to help him, but if she didn’t want to, she wouldn’t.

“Well, I like this kind of thing,” she says. “I wouldn’t have joined the board if I didn’t enjoy it. And I’m — it’s nice, you know. To be able to — help. You.”

Quentin feels something warm and tight twist in his chest. “Thank you. Really.”

“Sure,” she says, quickly unsoftening. “Oh — um, you know who actually you might want to talk to, is Josh.”

“Josh?” Quentin wrinkles his nose. “I’m trying to fix a coffeemaker, not grow the most potent strain of weed in the state of California.”

“Yeah, but — a lot of experts in the field would argue that all cultivation magic is Natural magic at the core, or Naturalism-adjacent, at least, and like — he really knows his shit, Q. I mean, I was in Fillory the other day and he made a Waldorf salad that was honestly kind of obscene.”

“I’ll think about giving him a call,” Quentin says, intending to do no such thing. He has some pride left, still. “It sounds like things are going really well for you.”

“Yeah, I think so, actually,” Alice says; he can hear her funny smile, the one she always seems like she doesn’t know what to do with. That’s good; it’s what she deserves. “And you? You sound — good.”

Quentin runs his thumbnail along a fold, creasing it clean and sharp. “I think so, too.”

*

A few days later he’s on the porch rereading _A Wizard of Earthsea_ when one of the Pennys pops into existence across from him.

“Oh,” Quentin says, startled. “Hey. What are you —”

“I have your books,” says Penny, setting a stack of old hardcovers on the porch table, and it’s definitely their Penny, although Quentin can’t articulate how he knows. “From Alice. There’s one from Kady in there, too. Said she thought you might find it useful.”

“Oh,” he says, scanning the spines: herbals, mineral reference, a short theoretical overview, and at the bottom a paperback — some kind of memoir about drinking. Quentin feels half-appreciative, half-embarrassed to think of Penny knowing it’s there. “So you and Alice are friends now, too?”

Penny rolls his eyes. “Alice and I were always friends, dick.”

“I —” Quentin winces; he is being a dick. “Yeah, that — tracks. Sorry. Uh.” He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “Thanks for the books. Tell everyone I said hi.”

“I will,” Penny says. He studies Quentin up and down. Quentin ducks his eyes and tries very hard not to look bothered by the fact that he is wearing a shirt with a picture of a pineapple in sunglasses. “You look... like... less of an obvious fucking shitshow disaster than the last time I saw you,” he says, but the funny thing is he says it like he really means it, from the bottom of his heart.

“Thank you,” Quentin says, resisting the urge to say something sarcastic. Penny’s doing him a favor, after all. And technically might have just paid him a compliment? “I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah, well, I told you,” Penny says, shrugging. “I’m trying to do it better, this time around.”

*

He listens to _Welcome to the Monkey House_ while he makes it through week three of running again; he hates it as much as ever and also hates that actually now that he’s started stretching his calves are in fact no longer tight as drawn rubber bands all the goddamn time. It’s not physically easier than it has been, but it’s — psychologically easier, maybe, which feels like an idiotic thing to need basic exercise to be, but whatever — it helps, knowing he’s done this before; knowing that when he first started, week four seemed a hideous impossibility, and by the time he got there it was only hideous. It helps feeling like there’s something he has to come back to, instead of something he’s beginning from scratch.

Sometimes while he’s jogging or walking or biking or sitting on the porch, his thoughts drift to Eliot, and it hurts, every time. He doesn’t know how it’s ever going to stop hurting and sometimes if he thinks about it too long he doesn’t know how he’s going to live with it, either, how anyone could keep going with a pain that felt like walking on knives. But he has things to do and places to go and — elves? They have elves in California? — elves to haggle with over the favor offered in exchange for a chupacabra’s bezoar in what Ray warned him before giving the address is an important cultural ritual to avoid offending the — like, they’re elves. Pointy-eared ethereal-ass motherfuckers. Sure. Fine. He goes to a shop accessible through a hidden stairwell in a dark alley and he gets the stone in exchange for charming a music box to light up when it plays (okay) and he bikes back and briefly he considers biking himself right into the side of a truck because what the fuck kind of person, Eliot, dismisses fifty years like they were nothing, but he doesn’t, because it’s Taco Tuesday back at the house, which might set a new record for dumbest reason to stay alive he’s ever come up with, but maybe that’s what living with it means. That you just — keep going, even when you’re bleeding out with every step. Maybe it really is that easy, even when it’s also that hard.

He makes Julia’s revisions, he makes Alice’s revisions, he makes Rishi’s revisions because Rishi said he wanted to know what got Quentin interested in residue theory, he makes the book club’s revisions because they’ve all become endearingly if a little intimidatingly invested in his success. He goes to yoga and when the instructor says to listen to his breathing he does but he listens to the magic, too, thinking it’s clearer than it used to be, with a richer texture when he pays attention. He adds another star to the tree, he knifes another stroke closer to the animal he’s carving, he makes it through week four, hearing _a long time ago, we used to be friends,_ aching with it but not slowing down beyond already being the slowest runner in probably the world. He falls asleep tired and wakes up with a clear head, ready to work.

*

“So I think I’m basically ready to test it,” Quentin says, “I just need — the pot I have’s not going to work, and I’m not sure how big the environment needs to be. The spatial aspect once it gets going is a little hard to predict, in terms of how much of a buffer it needs, and the tricky thing is that I think it’s width that’s the real consideration more than height, which — could mean a really big pot.”

He’s talking to Luisa at the dining table, but Ray calls over from where he’s working the stove, filling the house with the smell of garlic and onion. “If you need more space, I can clear some for you in the garden beds.”

Quentin looks up at him, surprised. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to throw out your stuff for me — especially something that might not even work.”

Ray waves this off. “I have a spell series for it, it’ll take me twenty minutes. One of them’s been basically placeholder stuff since this guy Jordan moved out last year, I haven’t gotten around to doing anything good with it anyway. Besides —” He tips over the contents of a mixing bowl and the pan hisses in reply. “You’ve got me curious now. And even if this one doesn’t work, the next one might, right?”

“Thank you,” Quentin says, relieved and a little nervous, now that the last domino is in place.

So that night he takes the mix derived from Alice’s library books, glittering and burned, and at the raised bed Ray’s cleared of everything but soil he digs a hole to pour most of it into, and marks a circle around it with a talismanic rune sequence he found in one of Rishi’s articles, and places a white ceramic shard of a plate in the center of it and buries it two inches deep, and with a series of tuts modified off of Julia’s suggestions and a Latin incantation expanded after a tip from Book Club Marcia, he casts. He goes through the sequence he’s designed, keeping his focus steady, feeling the energy in his hands crackling enough that he knows _something_ is happening; and just at the moment he’s supposed to close out, he — pauses. Holds it. Listens for the magic of the broken thing, that strain that means something was shattered and wants to be whole; listens the way he’s always been able to do, to this particular tone, and listens the way Luisa’s shown him, not to push but to pull, acting on it and seeing if it will act for him, and he — invites it, to move with what he’s asking it to do. Then — wingtip-cross, a last check to feel — the magic concentrated there, under the dirt. He’s done what he can; it’s time to let go.

*

He’s estimating that the full spell will take about three days; he attempts to spend them not having a heart attack. He tells himself to stop triple-checking his meta-math but he does it obsessively anyway; he stations himself in the kitchen as basically a full-time assistant to anyone who wants him. He smokes cigarettes to feel better, telling himself he’s been doing a great job of cutting back and it’s a special occasion, until he’s smoked too much and starts feeling deranged. He folds stars maybe a little manically and downloads Toni’s favorite crossword app. He watches Luisa fill her hands with water, which she warns him is tough for anyone out of the discipline, and launches himself into failing to do it, over and over, because the challenge is a distraction from the waiting.

He reads the book Kady gave him and has to make it through in short bursts, finding it warmly familiar and discomfitingly recognizable in equal measure, not even so much the parts about drinking as the parts about everything else. About life, and fear, and looking for secret doors. _Sometimes I think I am literally phobic about feelings_. About choices that seem inevitable, until you decide they’re not. He goes to yoga, he starts week five. He mails Margo’s map to the penthouse, figuring she can decide if she wants it or not. He chops potatoes with Ray in the kitchen listening to 90s hip-hop on his speakers and Nico and Luisa arguing about libertarianism outside and he thinks: this is his life, now; this is a life. He thinks that maybe the reason he didn’t walk into the ocean because Eliot didn’t love him is that he had something to come back to, even before he knew he’d made that true.

*

Cynthia knocks on his door on the third day to let him know that she was walking back in and spotted something blossoming in his cleared-out square of soil and Quentin manages he thinks to make it downstairs with something approaching dignity before breaking into a run to see what he’s done.

He crouches down beside it, eager and afraid, feeling it out before making or letting himself look. Something happened, at least; the magic around it is palpably different than it was before, and the magic within it feels — he swallows against his escalating pulse, trying not to hope too hard. This is the process, he reminds himself, digging into the dirt; even if it’s not what you wanted, that’s how the process goes.

He reaches and he feels — something hard, and smooth, very smooth; thin and broad, with — his heart skips — a rounded edge; he lifts it to the surface and dusts off the soil and holds it up, marveling: a white ceramic plate, in its unblemished entirety. Whole, seamless, not one chip around the rim, not one crack across the base. Something complete, where before was only a broken thing.

Mended, because of him.

Quentin — is fucking crying again, but he can’t bring himself to mind, because — because his magic is broken and his love is gone and everything that hurt still fucking hurts, but — he fixed something. He can still fix things, even just little ones, even just one cheap plate. And if he can fix the plate, then, maybe —

He has to show the rest of the house, who’ve been so accommodating of his limited tolerance for suspense; he can bring it to the next book club meeting, too. He’ll email Rishi about it, obviously, and let Alice know, and thank her again, and thank Penny for dropping the books off, but — but first — he takes out his phone, starts to compose a text, then on a whim calls instead; luckily, she picks up. “Jules,” he says, grinning as he says it, “hey — do you want to come out for our solstice party?”

*

Julia does come out for the solstice party, arriving a few hours before it’s set to start; after hugging her hello, Quentin briefly feels guilty that he didn’t invite Penny to drop by as well. Like, that’s probably rude of him, right? Maybe Julia extended an invite, she has better people skills than he does.

“I have your early birthday present,” he says, letting her go.

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” she says, but he runs up to his room and brings down the peculiar creature he’s been whittling.

“So I googled what the fuck Capricorn means,” Quentin says, “and it’s like — a goat, but like a sea-goat? So — some of the pictures showed just like a regular goat, but then in others it had this like, mermaid tail — I went with the tail, because it seemed cooler, and also because two legs was fucking easier to carve than four — anyway — that’s your thing, right? Your sign?”

Julia takes the little wooden — sea-goat, sure, _whatever, astrology_ — grinning ear to ear. He feels a matching grin spreading on his face and warmth filling his chest — it’s been way too long since he made her this happy. “Oh my god. I love it, Q.” She flings her arms around him and squeezes him tight again.

It’s less than two months since she was last here, but Quentin feels like a year has passed. Like in those two months, he stepped into some new life. It feels good, to be able to talk with her at the dining table about her proposals for increasing admissions equity and his newfound begrudging tolerance for meditative acts like they’ve always talked, like what matters about them is how much they love each other and not that he’s falling apart. It feels _great_ to watch her and Luisa animatedly bond over reasons Brakebills sucks, rolling their eyes in kind of adorable mirrored unison as Julia talks about the resistance she’s getting to making cooperative magic a bigger part of the curriculum.

“See,” Luisa says, “and even the terminology, like — some of the schools still use _cooperative magic_ , right, and the hedge hubs that spring up around them tend to follow suit. But I learned it as _collaborative magic_ at Blackholly, and — it’s a small thing, but words have power, especially for fucking magicians, right?”

“Oh, totally,” Julia says, “and I never even noticed that, but you’re so right — the emphasis is completely different. If you’re cooperating, that has this connotation of like, finding a way to get along, because you have to. But if you’re collaborating — you’re building something together, something that’s really jointly yours. Which, obviously that’s why Brakebills doesn’t want to emphasize it in the curriculum, even though it’s got such potential and, honestly, for young magicians it’s a safer way to learn a lot of spells.”

“Easier, too, right?” Luisa says. “Like, Quentin and I have been working together, right —”

And she catches Julia up on Quentin’s limited adventures in vernacular magic, which of course she wants to see, laughing in delight when the smell of jacaranda fills the room while Quentin spreads his hands with the same expression she used to use when he’d finally nailed a new coin trick well enough to show her; and then of course she wants to try it, reaching out for Luisa’s anchor a few times with that look that means they are going to be here until she gets it or everyone collapses of exhaustion, whichever comes first, until Quentin says, joining disparate strands, “Wait — okay, if the whole point being made earlier was that cooperative magic, or collaborative magic, or whatever, makes it easier to learn, what if we both —”

“Shit, yeah,” says Luisa.

So they cast together, or almost-cast, and Julia’s eyes go wide — “ _Fuck_ , yes, that’s so much clearer” — and Quentin can, he can _feel_ the moment latches on, or keys in, or — and then the three of them cast, together, and the whole house smells like something blooming.

*

The solstice party is crowded and chill and bubbling over with vaguely holiday-themed good cheer, present mostly through a playlist heavy on novelty Christmas songs and Cynthia’s thematically frosted cookies. Julia winds up talking for half the night to some of the book club crew, at least a few of whom she apparently recognizes from the last solstice party, right before they split; Quentin hopes none of them remembered him, because he was not in any condition that night to retain a memory of anyone’s face. He helps himself to a glass of some milky white liqueur Luisa says is a traditional Puerto Rican recipe she got from her dad and realizes as he drinks it, sweet and rich, that it’s the first time in weeks he’s had anything stronger than Red Bull.

In the morning they walk along the beach, Julia still hyped about the possibilities of cooperative magic. “Kady and I have been talking about how getting the info out there isn’t enough, right? Magicians need magicians to learn, especially when they’re starting out — I mean, when I was trying to learn magic on my own, I almost burned down my fucking apartment. So ideally, in addition to spells and theory and tips, there would also be — I don’t know, some kind of set of guiding principles not just for people learning magic, but for people wanting to teach it.”

“Right,” Quentin says. “Spreading access not just through materials, but through those kinds of techniques.”

“And I feel like what we were talking about yesterday makes me feel like cooperative — _collaborative_ magic has to be central to that.” They stop at the edge of the selkies’ territory, walk up to sit on a towel on the dunes, feeling the breeze. Julia flicks her gaze down at him as they settle in and quirks an eyebrow. “I like the outfit, by the way.”

For December the temperature has noticeably cooled, especially by the ocean; Quentin’s wearing sweatpants and a hoodie that says WEED BE GREAT FRIENDS. He rolls his eyes. “Figured my wardrobe should finally start reflecting my true passions in life.” She laughs; he hesitates for a moment, then says, serious but trying not to get too heavy, “I’m, uh — I’m actually not committed to the wake and bake lifestyle anymore. Not that — like, I haven’t sworn off it, or anything, and, honestly, it’s insane that it’s not legal in New York yet, like —”

“Fucking Cuomo.”

“— seriously — but I’m. You know.” He shrugs, ashamed that he feels the need to clarify this, but wanting her to know. Too embarrassed that it feels like it’s a change worth noting to bring himself to spell it out: _Most days I’m mostly sober_. It sounds like he thinks it’s an achievement, when you say it like that, and it’s not, really, or it shouldn’t be. He doesn’t want it to be.

“I figured,” Julia says with a soft smile. “You seem like you’re doing well.” She bites her lip, looking out at the bay. “Are you?”

“I am,” Quentin says, and it feels — true, and strange, and burned around the edges.

“When I left you here, in June —” Julia hesitates. “I didn’t know — I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. I thought — there was a part of me that was scared that would be the last time I ever saw you.”

Quentin’s stomach twists. He still hasn’t told her that on his birthday he nearly died, and he doesn’t know if he ever will, or should. It’s become one of those things he can’t figure out the right answer for, can’t be sure of the correct interpretation: if he’s being a good friend by protecting her from guilt she doesn’t need to feel over something that feels by now very far away, or if he’s hiding from her the way he has so many times before. “I think,” he says instead of telling her now, “if you hadn’t — I’d like to believe that there were other roads for me that ended up okay. But I was so stuck where I was, and I was so intent on making it worse, and worse, and worse — I kind of think if a different option had been possible, it wouldn’t have gotten so bad to start with.” He still can’t really understand it. Looking back at himself six months ago is like staring at someone he used to know through thick, warped glass, hazy and inscrutable. “I think it helped, to — to know that I was doing this on purpose. It took a while, but. I — I do feel okay now, mostly. Not great, all the time, and still sort of fucked up, but — okay. And sometimes more than okay, I mean — pulling up the plate, holding for the first time in ages something in my hands that I’d — that I’d mended, in a way —” His throat tightens, remembering.

Julia slides her hand into his. “That must have been so cool.”

“It felt —” He doesn’t know how it felt. He almost laughs, trying to put it into words, because all the options that come to mind are phrases used to name his recent vices: he felt drunk on the thrill of knowing what he’d done; high, glowing untouchable beyond the stratosphere; turned on, every cell in his body suddenly awake. “It felt good,” he says finally. “Really fucking good. And — it’s not, you know, that’s not everything, but — I mean maybe you had a point, because… I didn’t need Eliot, to feel like that. And I’m — I’m not really sure I thought that was still possible.”

She leans her head on his shoulder; he can’t see her face, but he knows she’s smiling, and he feels himself smiling in unseen return. “You still haven’t told me, by the way, what the answer was. How do you make something whole, if you can’t put it back how it was?”

Quentin feels the weight of his best friend against his shoulder, her warmth at his side. He looks out at the bay, with its secret residents making magic beneath the waves; he thinks about the mint-green house with its unsecret denizens, and its birdsong windchime that sounds like home. He thinks about spellcraft and library books and faith in the process; he thinks about the magic he’s been learning that Brakebills didn’t even bother to tell him was there. He thinks about calligraphy and movies and smoking a lot of pot, about Kurt Cobain and Celine Dion and Four Quartets, about book club and game night and fucking yoga. About the bay which looks so big, leading to the ocean which is bigger. About seeing, and doing, and doing again. About the house in La Jolla, and his son placing a tomato seed lovingly in the soil.

He squeezes her hand and says, “You give it space to grow.”


	5. Chapter 5

“Ten — nine — eight — seven — six — five — four — three — two — one —”

The party erupts in the expected cheer, with someone kicking the volume up on the speakers and cups of various things which are mostly not champagne being sloppily toasted around the room. Quentin winds up making out briefly with Jenny from book club in a generic it’s-New-Year’s-and-everyone’s-drunk sort of way, or at least he hopes so, because he doesn’t want to make book club awkward. She laughs and claps his shoulder before tilting off to find a friend of hers when they break apart, so he figures the worst that will happen is that Luisa will give him shit for it.

Luisa sidles up to him a few minutes later by the snack table while he’s debating if he wants a weed brownie and he braces himself, but she just says, “Make any resolutions? I can’t think of any good ones besides ‘stop fucking the bassist,’ which is less a resolution and more a foundational necessity for preserving my dignity.”

Quentin doesn’t, usually — historically his line on them has been that they’re a manifestation of America’s pathological addiction to the cult of self-improvement, in contrast to Julia’s stance that it’s nice to have goals — but he came to California for a reason, and lately he’s been feeling good enough that he thinks it might be within reach. Plus, his self is in need of improving. Like, objectively. “I’m gonna quit smoking, and I’m gonna run three miles without going into cardiac arrest,” he says. “And I’m gonna fix that fucking coffee maker.”

“Ooh,” Luisa says. “Those are good ones.”

She holds up her hand for a high five and he takes it, thinking: And then I’m going to fix my fucking life. He’s going to figure out how to be the person he’s supposed to be, with no more fucking up or falling apart. It’ll be just like the coffee maker, once he’s holding the unbroken object in his hands, fixed like it had never been anything other than whole. Every crack sealed shut, every piece back in its place.

*

“Life sucks and I hate everything,” Quentin says, plunking down on the porch steps.

Luisa, sitting on a chair and reading, because she picked a nice, normal resolution, makes a sympathetic noise. “Another dud?”

Quentin opens the pack of cigarettes he just bought in a snit after checking the garden bed and finding a whole lot of nothing. He lights one without tutting; that one really is easier this way, once you get used to it. “Another six duds, if you want to get technical.” He’s spent two weeks throwing everything he’s got at the godforsaken coffee maker, and not one of the pieces he’s broken off and planted has so much as mutated; magical dead-ends, every useless one of them. “Magic is stupid. I’m going to learn to code.”

“Don’t let Nico hear you say that,” Luisa says. “He’ll think you’re serious. You’ll be getting emails about fucking programming boot camps for years.”

“Maybe I am serious,” Quentin says. “At least computers, as far as I know, do what you fucking tell them to.”

He takes a drag, then another. In a voice that is somehow more cutting for appearing on the surface completely nonjudgmental, Luisa says, “I thought you quit.”

“Well,” Quentin says, inhaling again with unjustified defiance, “I thought maybe I was a half-competent magician who had an idea that was working, instead of a fucking dumbass who can’t do shit, but life comes at you fast.”

“Mmm,” she says mildly, turning a page.

He ignores her and keeps smoking, but already the appeal is diminishing under the weight of — she’s not even looking at him. She’s like, _psychically projecting_ — “Ugh, _fine_.” He stubs it out morosely. “This is why nobody likes people from California.”

“I know,” she says, perfectly serene.

Quentin fights an internal battle with himself and either wins or loses, then stands up and starts heading inside. “You can throw them out for me,” he says, dropping the carton on the table in front of her, “if you’re so into not minding your business.”

“I get off on that shit,” she says, batting her eyelashes, “thanks so much.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and goes to get a beer from the fridge.

*

He didn’t necessarily think the spell would translate unaltered from a plate to something as complicated as a coffee maker, although maybe he secretly hoped it might, but he had thought that what he’d done so far would net him — something. Some evidence of growth, some indication that he was on the right track. An indication that his work so far was at least applicable to what he’d actually set out to do. But from the first attempt he could tell that some key step or ingredient was missing; the magic wasn’t catching when he cast the way he’d expected. By now he’s fucked around with ratios and alternate base minerals and dozens of herb combinations and sixteen different translations of the original incantation, _not_ counting various emendations and expansions in each language, and — nothing. Not one clue about what he’s missing or where he should head next.

The coffee maker was supposed to be the harbinger of his newfound solidity, but it’s becoming instead the latest hook for hanging his obsessive ruminations. Less like the anchor it had seemed like in the optimism of the new year and more like stones tied around his ankles, weighing him down. He thinks about it while running through week nine, further than he’s made it yet and still so far from the end, and then through week nine again because the plan wants him to go from five-minute intervals to an uninterrupted twenty minutes, which really feels like unjustified confidence in him on its part, and not a challenge he feels up to while the coffee maker lies in his closet, chipped away at bit by bit with no change in prognosis. He thinks about it while staring at a page he can’t stop thinking about it long enough to actually read, and he thinks about it while drinking a beer and watching TV he’s not really paying attention to at night either in the living room with someone else or on his laptop in bed. It dims the colors on a January which still feels depressingly January-esque despite rarely cracking chilly, tangles itself into being out of both supplies and motivation on his various crafting endeavors and not sure what else to try to fill up the hours except staring into space listening to Bon Iver and brooding some more on the thing he’s hardly sure how to even keep trying to do. He lights cigarettes in bed, the air heavy above him with the smoke and the sense that for a moment he’d felt like he’d been going somewhere real, and now he’s woken up to find that once again he’s stuck in place.

*

He’s brooding on it some more walking or really hobbling his way home after a run that he’d intended to last twenty minutes but wound up quitting at fifteen, which Julia would probably say would mean he was going too fast, but it’s impossible for him to think of his Galapagos-turtle-in-a-wind-tunnel speed as faster than any theoretical benchmark for human locomotion, when he stops short just inside the house’s wards at the sight of —

“Margo,” he says, heart rate speeding right back up.

She’s leaning against the railing of the front steps, her gaze cool and appraising, arms crossed like she’s been waiting for him in a way that makes him feel unaccountably like he’s late and should apologize. She looks her usual magazine-cover impeccable, in a sleek and expensive Earth-made outfit that nonetheless on her scans distinctly regal, her hair tied back in an elaborate knot. “Quentin.”

Quentin — probably would have preferred that his reunion with Margo Hanson not take place while he’s heaving for breath and dripping with sweat with a damp lazy ponytail for the hair he’s been too apathetic to get cut wilting at the back of his head while the hair too short to stay up sticks to his undoubtedly red face, wearing his neon-bright running shoes and red drawstring shorts and a tank top that reads SUN’S OUT GUNS OUT. He’s not too proud to admit that. “Hi,” he says, trying to wrap his mind around her presence. Julia would have told him, if anyone had like, _died_ , right? Unless _Julia_ died — no, that’s stupid, Julia’s not dead. “What, uh — what are you doing here?”

Margo pushes herself upright, pursing her red lips. “Funny you should ask that.” She takes a few steps closer, looking him frankly up and down, and for just a second Quentin is emotionally transported to his first month at Brakebills when being around her always felt like he’d been asked on the spot to audition for a part in a TV show he’d never heard of but which he for some reason desperately wanted to get. Then he shakes it off because — whatever, she’s the one who came to him. “This asshole I used to know sent me some map,” she says, looking him steely in the eyes. “It was kind of a nice gesture, if I’m being honest. Almost like he wanted me to think that maybe he wasn’t such a fucking asshole anymore.” Quentin just barely resists the urge to duck his head and hide. “That seemed like an iffy story to me, though. Big if true, but — not the likeliest. So I decided to come out and investigate.”

Quentin can’t help asking, “You liked the map?”

Margo presses her mouth into a firm line. “Maybe. Maybe I liked the map. But you and I need to fucking talk, and whether I liked the map is going to depend on how that goes.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, still not sure where this interaction is heading. “Uh — do you want to come in, I guess? And — can I maybe like, shower first?”

“Sure thing,” Margo says, lips spreading in one of her dangerous Margo smiles.

Quentin leaves her in the kitchen, where she accepts a glass of water and declines his vague offering of _uh, other things maybe_ , to go take a quick shower, continuing to feel as though he may be hallucinating the entire encounter. When he makes it downstairs wearing a plain T-shirt and smelling okay she’s nodding in conversation with Toni, which is a sight beyond his ability to really comprehend.

“Quentin,” Toni says when he approaches, “I was just telling your friend about the composting ring we’re setting up with the house on La Playa.”

“You know me,” Margo says, with a syrupy smile and eyes that say _bitch you live like this?_ “If there’s one thing this bitch loves, it’s composting.”

“Oh — and the other benefit of setting up a vermicomposting bin,” Toni says, turning back to Margo, “is that the worm castings have _so_ many magical applications, in everything from poultices to phosphoric spells.”

“Oh, _do_ they?” Margo croons, wrinkling her nose in a way that seems sweet if you’ve never, ever met her before. “Well. This has been fascinating, but Q and I have a lot of catching up to do. Isn’t that right, Q.”

“Uh — yeah,” Quentin says, “yeah, it’s — been a while, do you wanna go out back?”

“Sounds great,” Margo says, giving Toni a finger-wave goodbye.

They sit on the porch, mostly not because Quentin thinks if they head towards the beach Margo might try to drown him. He has no idea what she wants or why she’s here. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asks, taking out the carton of cigarettes he’d bought yesterday after another failed casting.

“It’s bad for my skin,” Margo says, “so yes.”

Reluctantly Quentin puts it back in his pocket.

“So,” Margo says expectantly, even though she’s the one who wanted to talk, and he doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be talking about.

“Look,” he says, “I’m — I left Eliot alone, okay? And I’m — I’m not planning on going back on that anytime soon, so. You can rest easy. He’s safe from me.” Quentin doesn’t mention that this is because every time he thinks about Eliot it feels like his lungs are covered in paper cuts. It doesn’t seem relevant.

Margo’s eyes narrow. “You really still think this is all about Eliot, don’t you.”

Startled, Quentin blinks. “I — well. I _did_ , until you… said that, which kind of implies that it’s — not, I guess, so —” He shrugs. “I don’t know, are you going to tell me what this is about?”

Her nose flares, just slightly, before she answers. “My coronation, asshole.”

“Your —” Quentin starts, and then he — remembers. “Oh, shit.” He looks down at the white-painted wood of the table, neck starting to heat up with the memory.

“Yeah,” Margo says. “The ceremony to officially cement my post-banishment return to the throne. The one I rescheduled, _three times_ — which is not some small fucking thing for a goddamn royal affair of a newly half-functional country, I think it gave Rafe an ulcer — because _you_ kept saying the date didn’t _work_ for you. The one where we finally had it and you swore up and down you were going to make it and then you missed the ceremony and showed up to the party, totally trashed, to speak to me exactly one time, when you said —” Quentin winces in anticipation “— _great party, Margo, I gotta pee_.”

That — yeah. Maybe he should offer to let him Margo drown him, as like, penance. “I’m — I am sorry about that. Really sorry.”

“Mmm,” Margo says, with a bitter smile. “So sorry you didn’t even think you had anything to apologize to me for until I brought it up.”

“I —” He shakes his head, buries his face in his hands. “It was a really — fucked up time for me —”

“Yeah, not good enough,” Margo says. “Not good enough, when I —” Her voice cuts off and her chin dimples briefly and she looks — hurt? Margo looks hurt? Quentin — does not know how to process this. It feels bad, though. That much is horribly clear. “Listen, I don’t let a lot of people in. And maybe that’s what makes me fucked up, and maybe that’s what’s kept me alive long enough to make me a good fucking king, but either way, it is what it is. But I let you in. Yeah, that was basically a favor to Eliot at first, but it — it didn’t stay that way. And I thought that was a two-way street, but you blew me off and blew me off, and I rolled with it, because _no shit_ you were having a fucked up time, but —” She shakes her head. “I don’t have a lot of experience — mattering to people, okay? And I thought mattered to you, but at a certain point it felt like — the writing was on the wall, and you’d have to be an idiot not to read it.”

“You matter to me,” Quentin says before he can think of any other response. God, how has he fucked up so bad that she doesn’t even know that? “Margo. Of course you matter.”

“Well how the fuck was I supposed to know?” she demands. “Jesus, Quentin, the second time you cancelled, on like two days’ notice by the way, you told me you couldn’t come because you were having lunch with your _dead father_. Which is such a clusterfuck of psychological unwellness that it almost defies human comprehension, but it was also a fucking dick move. So no, your fucked up time doesn’t cut it. I want to understand, without any bullshit, exactly what made you think that shit was okay.”

“I…” Quentin casts back his memory to New York, after dying: the fuzzy wisps of half-thought and impulse that formed his inner monologue, the months he was already running away while staying in place. “I don’t — I really don’t know,” he fumbles. “I guess I — didn’t think of it as a big deal at the time.”

“Not a big _deal_?” Margo seethes, with something awfully wounded beneath her tone.

“Not — it was a big deal that, that you were High King again, and — everything about that,” Quentin clarifies hastily. “It just… it didn’t seem like a big deal for me to be part of it.”

Margo stares at him, halfway between angry and dumbfounded. “How the fuck could it not be a big deal, Q? When you were there for the very first one — after everything you and I had been through, with — fuck, I can’t believe I have to explain this!”

“I — know,” Quentin says, because exposed to the light — yeah, it sounds nuts, even to him. But — “I — I don’t know, I guess I couldn’t really imagine that it would matter if I was there or not.” _Couldn’t_ sounds like a bullshit word as soon as he says it. “Or — or I didn’t,” he makes himself say, “I didn’t think about… what it would mean to you, if I wasn’t. I wasn’t thinking —” He gives a harsh laugh. “I wasn’t thinking, is kind of how you could — summarize it. About — anything, and definitely, uh — definitely not about anyone else.” It’s such a lousy reason he kind of wants to smack himself, hearing it, but he’s digging into himself for something better and coming up empty. “I’m sorry, I guess — I know that’s a shitty excuse. I wish I had something, anything better to offer, but I… I really don’t.” He looks down at the wooden slats of the porch floor, waiting for her to decide she’s done with him for good and leave.

Margo says, “It is a shitty excuse. But —” She breathes slow and deep, in and out. “I guess it’s not bullshit. And that’s what I asked for, so.”

Quentin lifts his eyes, uncertain. Margo’s face is dissatisfied and pensive, settling into something almost resigned. She’s still here, though. “I really am sorry, Margo,” he says softly. “About the coronation, and about the Eliot shit, and about — I guess I wrote us off, when things went to hell with me and him, because I figured — and I mean, maybe you wouldn’t have wanted me around anyway, not that I blame you, but. You did matter to me. For — whatever that’s worth, which is maybe not a lot. And you still do, if — if you want that.”

She nods slowly. “The Eliot stuff —”

Quentin cringes. “I know, I —”

Margo sighs. “Look. Have you behaved abominably?”

She says this like a rhetorical question, but then she keeps looking at him when she’s done. “Um — am I supposed to answer?”

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I wanna hear you say it.”

“Oh,” he says. Fair enough, he guesses. “Yes. Yes I’ve — I’ve been a real dickwad about it. Just —”

“Horrendous,” Margo supplies.

“Horrendous,” he agrees. “Very bad.”

She gives a curt jerk of her chin, like that’s satisfactory. “But — come on, Q. Do you really think I, of all people, have no idea what it’s like to want to murder Eliot Waugh with your bare hands because he’s done something too stupid to live?” Quentin laughs in surprise, then immediately stops, worried he wasn’t supposed to. But Margo just says, “I _invented_ that shit. Don’t get me wrong, I love him like I love my eleven-step Korean skincare routine, but his familiarity with basic common sense leaves something to be desired.”

Quentin — doesn’t feel like there’s anything he can add to that that would be permissible. He manages a nondescript “Yeah, maybe.”

“I did like the map,” she admits, like she almost wishes she hadn’t. Quentin feels a small smile coming on anyway. “I had that box set as a kid — I asked Santa for it, and Daddy came through. Then my mom tore it up once while we were having a fight about some stupid bullshit. So. It was — sweet, I guess, to get it back like this. The inscription was a nice touch. Did you use Gillon’s Quill?”

Quentin shakes his head. “I did it by hand, actually.”

Margo raises an eyebrow, not unimpressed. “Really.”

“Yeah, I — I heard that hobbies are a thing people have,” Quentin says. “Trying to — find ways to spend my time that don’t involve fucking up anyone’s life.”

“Like composting,” Margo says, sitting back.

“Like composting,” Quentin agrees.

“And your friend with the worms,” Margo goes on, “she mentioned some coffee maker spell — that’s the shit Wicker was losing her tits about, I assume.”

“Kind of,” Quentin says. “I — I wrote a spell, to — to fix things, I guess. To turn a broken piece back into a whole, by kind of — planting it, and growing it almost like from a seed. And it worked on a plate, but —” He shakes his head. “A coffee maker’s a lot more complicated, and I haven’t had much luck adjusting it to scale up successfully.”

“You should talk to Josh,” Margo says. Quentin tries not to react to this, but his face must give something away because she says, “I’m serious. Anything with dirt and growing shit, I promise you he’s got opinions, and they’re probably pretty good.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Quentin says, because he doesn’t want to fight with her after they’ve just sort of made up. He’s not going to call Josh Hoberman for advice, though. He’s not ready to admit that’s where his life is at. “Are you,” he can’t stop himself from asking, “like are you and him, you guys are still — is that still happening?”

Once again he must have betrayed more skepticism than he intended, because Margo arches a dangerous brow. “Are you really judging my sexual choices right now? Thirty seconds after I’ve forgiven you for setting a world’s record for consecutive time spent acting like a giant cockbite?”

“No,” he rushes to assure her, “no I’m — I’m not that suicidal today. And, uh — I mean if I were I wouldn’t, ever, because — that would be wrong, so — sorry, that was a dumb joke — I mean not quite a joke, I’m really _not_ that suicidal today — or most days, lately, so —”

“Yeah, you’re clearly doing great,” Margo says, with a ghost of a begrudging smile around her lips.

“Sorry,” he says, probably too late. “I — I dunno, I guess it did always just — surprise me, what you —” _What you saw in him_ would be the wrong thing to say here, for sure. “I mean, I feel like it’s not crazy to notice that he’s not exactly your usual type.”

“Hoberman?” Margo grins. “Yeah, but you know what it is? He’s —” She pauses to look for the word, and then her face does something unfamiliar. “He’s _easy_. I think of myself as a girl who likes a challenge, and that’s because I fucking do. But, damn, running a goddamn country is challenge enough. If anything it’s _more_ of a challenge now that a brand new apocalypse isn’t auto-prioritizing our to-do lists every day. In times like these, it turns out it’s nice to have a little easy, somewhere on the menu. Variety is the spice of life, you know?”

Quentin can’t stop looking at her expression. His first thought is that it’s softer, but it’s — not, actually; not like he’s seen her soften, sometimes, when talking about Eliot. Her smile is — simple. Uncomplicated. Like she’s thinking about something without any rough edges. Something she’s never had to fight for or protect.

“Yeah,” he says, “that makes sense. So, uh —” He tries to think of what the person he’s supposed to be would talk about. The person Margo’s forgiven him for forgetting how to be. “How is Fillory these days?”

Margo rolls her eyes. “Oh, well — the Committee on Age of Consent Laws for Interspecies Relations is hosting their first town hall next week, so. That promises to be a particularly exhausting shitshow.” Quentin makes a sympathetic _oooh_. “Meanwhile, the Wellspring’s all good and magic _should_ be flowing fine and dandy giving us unimportant little things like crops that actually grow and water we can actually drink, and for the most part it is, but we keep getting these outages without rhyme or fucking reason. We’re trying to patch things up or compensate as issues arise, but our merry little crew is stretched thin as it is, and things are getting touchy. The archipelago of the Fingerlings, off the South coast, they’re threatening an attack, which would be frankly idiotic of them strategically, because they’ve gotten hit by the outages pretty bad and they’re convinced I’m doing it on fucking purpose, like I have some secret magic I’m holding out on them. I sent Fen and Twenty-Three — yeah,” she says at Quentin’s face, “buddy comedy for the fucking ages — listen, they were available at the time. Plus, being High King is hard, you gotta make your own fucking fun. Anyway. I’ve sent them off to do a deep dive in the archives, maybe hit up the Neitherlands if Alice can get us in and there’s anything good there. Hopefully they come back with some answers about what the fuck is happening and why, and hopefully none of them are ‘because everything is about to go to complete shit, again.’”

“That sucks,” Quentin says.

“Tell me about it,” says Margo. He’s about to ask how she’s doing in the face of all that, noticing that she sounds at least as invigorated as she does annoyed, but then she says, “Oh, and just _wait_ till you hear the fuckery Ess thought he could get away with —”

She winds up telling him about the failed coup in Loria, and Idri’s request for assistance for temporary banishment, and the temptation of agreeing versus the tricky politics vis a vis the situation with the Floating Mountain; preparations for Rafe and Abigail’s impending nuptials (“It’s my signature issue, somehow,” Margo says, “of _course_ I’m letting them use the palace, and we _are_ introducing cameras to the Fillorians so I can have pictures of that shit from sea to Ochre Sea”); and the new attempts to introduce irrigation to the Wandering Desert (“But if it’s wandering,” Quentin says, and Margo says, “You get it”). When she’s exhausted her set of boasts and complaints, a litany he feels lucky to be offered after all this time, he thinks there might be some inarticulable thaw in her posture. “So what’s new with you?” she asks, in that half-curious, half-testing way she has.

Quentin doesn’t really want to dwell further on the coffee maker issue, so he casts about for some more optimistic news to share and winds up recapping for her last summer’s dalliance in hauntology. “Hauntology’s some fucked up shit, but it was — cool, I guess, in the end,” he finishes. “The spell, but also — I don’t know.” He fidgets with his fingers, embarrassed suddenly for reasons he doesn’t understand. “I guess it was cool to be, like — part of something, or whatever. Something that wasn’t just — my own fucked up life.”

“Yeah,” Margo says softly. “It is.”

Quentin thinks that this is — good, right? An overall success? It’s not like it was and maybe it never will be — god knows that’s more than he deserves — but she came, and he said what he needed to, mostly. He didn’t make it worse. He wonders whether he should show that he meant it when she said that he matters by asking her to stay for dinner or maybe get a drink, or if he shouldn’t push his luck on something so new. Then Margo takes out her phone and says, “Alright, I gotta jet. The time-limited portal I used to get over here is closing in an hour, and my Uber’s here.”

Quentin stands up to see her out, walking her down the porch steps and around the garden beds, to the front. “It was really good to see you,” he says. “I mean — I dunno, I’m sorry about — why you felt you had to come out here, but — but I’m glad you did, so.”

She bites her lip, studying him. “Thanks for the map.”

“I’m glad you liked it,” he says. He feels like he should say something more. Like there’s something he can tell her that will prove he was worth coming out here for, fix what he broke between them for good. He can’t think of the words that would do it, though.

“And seriously,” she says, gesturing at the barren soil before she turns to walk to the car, “call Hoberman. This shit is his jam.”

*

His irritation at the coffee maker for refusing to bend even slightly to his increasingly desperate modifications (he didn’t really think the malachite was going to work, but at this point he’ll try anything that doesn’t involve calling fucking Josh) is reaching a critical mass. He’s restless and irritated basically all the time, which itself is irritating because whatever he’s supposed to become it probably doesn’t involve feeling constantly annoyed. He skips yoga because he thinks if someone tells him to settle into the moment he’s going to punch a wall; he skips a run because he wakes up hungover and by the time his headache’s gone he’s just not fucking feeling it. He lies on his back staring at the ceiling listening to _In the Aeroplane Over the Sea_ and circling back and back and back to Margo’s visit, wondering if there’ll ever be a day where _forgiven_ branches out into _friends_ , mystified still by the question of how he’d let things get so bad, and not even noticed.

He strongly feels that in a just world his simmering frustration should, at the _very_ least, produce energy he can channel in a productive direction. But —

“Fuck,” he announces in defeat after he has failed for approximately the billionth time to fill his hands with water. “I can’t get any fucking closer.”

“I did warn you this one takes a while, even if you’re used to doing magic like this,” Luisa says from the opposite end of the living room couch. “Are you sure you don’t want to try something a little easier? There’s a neat one I use to dry shoes a little faster if you get caught in the rain.”

Quentin drums his fingers on his knee. Probably that would be the smart or at least mature thing to do, and therefore he should do it, unless it would be giving up. As opposed to sticking the course, which is either high-spirited determination or a masochistic urge to metaphorically crush his toes under a tractor until he can’t walk. Sometimes thinking about the person he’s supposed to be feels like his brain is a time bomb on a hacky cop show and he’s the officer trying to figure out whether cutting the red wire will defuse it or whether that’s only what the bad guy _wants_ him to think, while the whole time the audience at home is yelling at him that the answer is obviously whatever the answer obviously is. It’s super fun.

“I feel like I’m so pissed at the entirety of all magic right now,” he says, “I should be able to — use that, to crack this. But I can’t even connect them.”

Luisa’s mouth twists into a sympathetic smile. “Yeah, this isn’t one of those — most of the things I’ve learned like this, you can’t really muscle through them in that magic-comes-from-pain way. Which I’ve done, don’t get me wrong, and it’s cathartic as hell, but — it doesn’t work for everything.”

“Okay, but why not,” he says, frustrated. “Like — if it’s all the same ambient, and it’s all the same magic inside me, then — then why can’t I just take whatever I’ve got and put it wherever I fucking want to put it? Because, like — magic _does_ come from pain, so — why can’t this?” He feel retroactively stupid for having ever complained about this system. Pain is like his one perpetually renewable resource.

“There’s probably a technical answer to that I don’t have,” Luisa says, “but — again, I come back to thinking about it like language. You could say that language comes from pain, both in the species sense that it probably developed so we could shout for help and warn each other about poisonous berries or whatever, and if you think about the individual — like, babies cry because they’re hurt, or they’re hungry, or they need to sleep. They learn to say things that get their needs met. But you wouldn’t look at those things and say that that’s all of what language _is_ , or everything it’s for. Because language is for dealing with pain, but it’s also for — making jokes, or telling stories, or connecting to people. It’s part of how we live. Even babies who are born deaf babble with their hands. So — it’s not that magic _doesn’t_ come from pain. Of course it does. But you need more than that. It comes from — from living. From life.”

Quentin gnaws at some dead skin on his bottom lip. “Yeah but — when you think about it, _isn’t life pain_? And I know” — he can feel himself flushing already — “I know how that _sounds_ , I know it’s, it’s dramatic and myopic and sophomoric to say it like that, but — but when you really think about it, isn’t it also, like, just literally true?”

“I mean — yeah? Maybe?” Luisa says, shrugging. “But — it’s like, what’s that expression about comedy? Tragedy plus time? To me, it’s like that. Everyone’s got tragedy. It’s the other stuff that lets you make it into something funny, or beautiful, or turn it into magic — stuff like time.”

Quentin thinks of Eliot in a painful flash. He wonders if one day he’ll look back on that whole disaster and laugh. It’s hard to imagine. “So — so what am I supposed to do then? Just keep hammering away at this and hope that someday it clicks?”

“Pretty much,” Luisa says. She sounds like she knows she is delivering terrible news, which Quentin appreciates. “Or — it probably _would_ be easier if you had more experience doing magic like this, but technically you have everything you need to do the spell inside you already. It’s just a matter of kind of — actively living with it. Sort of carrying it around in your awareness, poking at it now and then, until you — adapt. Or until it becomes yours. Sort of like Alana always says at yoga, you know —” She adopts the breathy tone of her favorite instructor. “What we practice on the mat and what we practice off the mat are one and the same.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I cannot believe you’re so into her New Age bullshit.”

“I know,” Luisa says, grinning, “it’s insufferable.”

*

The trick isn’t Norse runes, or Anglo-Saxon runes, or Younger Futhark, or Dalecarlian runes, or Chinese characters, or Sanskrit alphabetics, or any of the various ungodly combinations he attempts in a show of desperation. It’s not adding reptilian bone shavings, or switching around the order of tuts, or any fucking thing he can manage to do to the incantation. It’s not treating the seed-piece in advance with a purification cleanse, or burning it and melting it into a more magically ergonomic shape.

He starts week ten over again and quits again just past minute fifteen. He skips book club because he doesn’t want to deal with questions about his nonexistent progress or field suggestions he has almost definitely either tried or already ruled out. He gets a text from Rishi asking him how the spell’s coming and he ignores it feeling only slightly guilty; he gets a text from Julia asking if he wants to come along to the monthly spellshare in Portland and he sends back _I’ll think about it_ , meaning absolutely not. He wakes up hungover and takes the day off trying at anything beyond bumming around in sweatpants watching TV, thinking maybe some time away will clear his head or re-energize him, and instead winds up leaning against the side of the house staring resentfully at his empty patch of soil, smoking because he’s not trying today and wondering what the fuck made him think he could pull this off. Maybe resolutions should be sequential. Maybe he should stop smoking first, and then fix the coffee maker once he’s found a better way to deal with stress. Or maybe he should give up on the smoking thing until he fixes the coffee maker, and then, worst comes to worst, silver lining is he _never_ has to stop smoking. Win-win.

Nico approaches the house on his bike, grocery bags in the front rack. “I thought you quit.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I hate this fucking state,” he says, stubbing the cigarette out on the pavement.

*

Luisa joins him on the back porch and announces, “Okay, I’m taking a shift on being pissed off and depressive. Scoot.”

Quentin obediently picks up his beer and makes room for her on the steps so she can perch beside him in prime moping territory. “What happened? Did the bassist get back with his ex?”

“I unfollowed him, so I wouldn’t know,” Luisa says primly. Quentin raises his eyebrows and nods in a gesture of _good for you_. “No, I got furloughed at work.”

“Oh shit,” Quentin says. “But I thought things were going really well for you guys.”

She exhales through her bangs. “Yeah, but — we’re dealing with fire and fire season’s over, so what the fuck do we need funding for? Never mind that this is time we could use to start coordinating with organizations in other cities, recruiting and training for the summer, fucking trying to refine our shit to make it efficient enough to scale without demanding more power than could be summoned by every half-decent magician in the state of California — no fires, no money, no job for me.”

“That sucks,” Quentin says, meaning it. He offers her his beer, more as a show of solidarity than anything else.

She waves him off, a faint smile on her lips. “No thanks, but I’ll love you forever if you roll me a joint right now.”

“Well,” Quentin says, wincing a little as he stands up for the first time in — it can’t be literal _hours_ , right? It might be hours — “I can’t turn down everlasting love.”

When he’s returned from his room with the necessary supplies and is rolling — he’s actually kind of okay at this by now, which he supposes is one point in favor of practice makes less fucking terrible — Luisa complains, “It’s so stupid. All this bureaucratic bullshit, finding the right ways to massage our findings to approved contacts in government or other agencies, always erring on the side of too small because keeping magic secret is more important than saving lives —” Quentin gives her the joint and she inhales, shaking her head as she blows the smoke out in heart-shaped rings. “I mean, I’ve been in magic-based non-profits too long to really have much standing here, but after a while you really start to feel like when people talk about, like, why did Dumbledore let Hitler happen?”

“You know in reality,” Quentin says as she hands it back to him, “Hitler was a pretty serious battle magician. So if Dumbledore had tried to stop him, he probably would have been toast.”

Luisa gives him a look. “Why do you know that?”

“It comes up more often than you’d think,” he says. He passes the joint back as he blows out smoke: cinnamon-roll swirls. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to look for another job?”

“Probably not,” she says. “My boss seems pretty sure I’ll be hired back come summer, and even if I’m sort of over parts of it, I like the place. I don’t have a single coworker I hate, which is _not_ something I take for granted. Plus, you know. I don’t pay rent and I live pretty cheap, so I’ve got savings.” Wisps of little five-pointed stars, like a hazy meteor shower. “I think I’ll give myself a day or two to wallow in bitterness and spite, and then — I don’t know what. But I need to find something to do, or I’m gonna go fucking crazy, _real_ fast.”

Quentin holds the smoke in his mouth, sitting on an idea he kind of doesn’t want to say but knows he should; exhales an angular bird, like an origami crane. “There’s a spellshare in Portland this Sunday Julia invited me to go with her to — you wanna come? She’s been raving about the scene there since last summer.” 

Luisa looks at him, eyes widening. “Oh man, for real? That sounds ideal right now, thank you.”

“I’ll let her know you’re in.” So — he’s going to the spellshare, apparently. He isn’t any more excited about it than he was, because he just doesn’t want to fucking do anything at all right now that sounds more exhausting than entertaining, which is pretty much all things, but — Luisa seems like she could use a distraction, and he’s her friend. If he’s still walking through quicksand trying to figure out most of what it is he needs to be doing, being a decent one has got to be at the top of the list. He can put up with a bunch of hedges crowdsourcing the best DIY heating agents or whatever, to do that.

*

Portland is legitimately cold in January, which feels like a big duh in retrospect but which still catches Quentin off-guard after a winter that’s felt at its coldest like a nice October day in New York; luckily when Penny drops them off in front of the bookstore, Quentin shivering in his sweatpants and jacket, Julia’s already there, Kady at her side. Quentin — should have been expecting that, probably, just like he should have been expecting Penny to stick around if Kady did, but he feels awkward, seeing her for the first time since — since she’s known whatever she’s decided it is she knows about him. Like there’s something on his face he can’t wipe off, that only she can see. But she doesn’t betray any newfound knowledge or concern in their brisk rounds of hellos and introductions, and Quentin follows Julia into the bookstore feeling relieved and a little dumb for his moment of worry.

Quentin had on some level expected the crowd to be cool in a surly and unimpressed way, but while there’s a high concentration of silver piercings and tattoos in attendance, the vibe is friendly, almost perky, particularly from the smiling pair of organizers in the center, welcoming everyone to the event. They say a few words of thanks for the community support before handing the mic over to today’s demonstration volunteers to begin the spellshare proper.

Today’s theme is cleaning spells, complete with a panoply of donated household goods to practice on, starting with a linked cluster of surface-cleaners all rooted in Tilden’s Eighth; Quentin knows most of these, but a variant to polish wineglasses is new to him. After the planned set has been run through, the floor is open to anyone who wants to teach something related; among a few others, Luisa raises her hand to show her preferred oven cleaner. Then there’s time for the crowd to master running the spells on their own.

It almost reminds Quentin of being back at Brakebills — learning new magic, checking himself against tutting diagrams — except for the alien and not unwelcome feeling that the people in charge, insofar as anyone is, actually want everyone to succeed, and the ones practicing with him do, too. People familiar with the spells or who’ve cracked them quickly offer advice to those still working; Quentin spots a guy near him who’s just about got a silverware spell down, only the angle of his index fingers is way too wide for a Roman base, and he thanks Quentin enthusiastically once the correction closes the gap. In a back corner he spots Luisa talking to a girl who seems discouraged, running a drying spell with her a few times as the girl’s casting grows in skill and confidence; when she manages it on her own, there’s a huge grin on her face, and a matching one on Luisa’s. There’s a palpable crackle of energy in the room, some combination of communal good spirits and the rush of so much magic being done in close quarters. Quentin drops in to — listen, or read it, or whatever you want to call it, and it might be the mood of the room bubbling over but it sure feels like it’s stronger than the sum of its parts suggest it should be. On a whim he tries the water spell again, and it doesn’t work, but the magic he needs is the clearest he’s felt it reaching on his own.

Afterwards the five of them walk, hands in pockets bracing against the wind, to a Thai place down the block, where they sit at a round table sharing curry and noodles. It feels — weird, his least weird times with Penny and Kady have always been moments of literal life and death stakes, when everything was too intense and too fast for anyone to slow them down with interpersonal grudges or awkwardness. He’s never really learned how to have a normal conversation with them. But they’re Julia’s friends now, and they both kind of saved his ass last year, so he figures he should probably get used to having them around, at the very least.

Julia is practically glowing with excitement. “Didn’t I tell you?” she says, playfully elbowing Kady. “Didn’t I say it was a cool thing, and you’d be glad you came?”

Kady rolls her eyes, but she’s smirking in what Quentin recognizes is a particularly friendly way. “Yeah, that was good.”

“I want to start doing something like that in New York,” Julia says. “We could host it at the apartment, maybe —”

“ _Big_ maybe,” says Kady.

“— or talk to some of the less sketchy hedge bars or safehouses — from what I’ve heard the ones in Queens tend to stay out of the drama,” Julia goes on. To Luisa she says, “New York hedge shit is a fucking mess, it’s this nightmare culture of like, secrecy and power plays and all these bullshit rivalries —”

“It sucks,” Kady confirms. “I came up in that scene, and it’s legit unbelievably toxic. And it’s not just the hedges, either.”

“Oh, totally,” Julia says, “like, academically trained magicians tend to just absorb the prejudices of whatever school they went to — so it’s like this two-front battle of trying to convince people to get over themselves and remember that in the end, we’re all here for the magic and what it can do. And I really feel like putting together something like that, with a mix of adepts of different backgrounds, could go a long way in reframing people’s priorities. I mean to start with, you guys felt it, right? That many people working on magic in the same place — there’s a charge to it, as good as anything you’ll find at any school.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “Which — I mean, this would take it further, but you and I were talking about cooperative magic as an access tool itself, right?”

“Right,” Julia says. “So — showing people that there’s real, literal power in shutting up about all this bullshit in-fighting, I think that could go a long way. And beyond that, just showing them that it can be — _fun_.”

“You might be right,” Kady says. “Honestly sometimes it feels like half the fight is just trying to convince people it doesn’t have to be like this. That there actually _is_ a better way, if you just — want there to be. And why wouldn’t you fucking want there to be, if the way things are sucks?”

“People do what they’re used to doing,” Penny says. “It takes a lot to break them out of it.”

“How did you get interested in access work?” Luisa asks him.

Penny jabs a thumb in Kady’s direction. “I just go where she goes.” Kady sticks her tongue out and makes a gagging noise, and Penny grins, unfazed. It’s — cute? They’re being cute? That is… not a word Quentin ever expected to associate with either of these people.

Out on the street while Luisa talks to Julia and Penny about vernacular magic, Kady asks Quentin, “How’re you doing?”

She says it casually enough that it could be small talk, seriously enough that it could mean more; Quentin appreciates the leeway and opts for something in between. “Been better, been worse?” He shrugs. What he means is that he’s drinking maybe more than he’d like to know he is or maybe — probably — more than he should, when he steps back to assess the situation which he mostly doesn’t, but nowhere near a life-ruining amount, so either it’s fine or he’s in total denial, but he doesn’t really feel like confessing that to her in the middle of some Portland sidewalk. “Thanks for the book,” he says instead. “I really — you were right, it was… useful. Or, not like — I mean I’m not — but just, the way it talked about things, it — it made a lot of sense to me, I guess. Maybe, uh —” He tries for a laugh that doesn’t quite escape nervous. “Maybe too much sense, considering —”

Kady cuts him off there, thank god. “It’s a good book. A lot of people like it, for a lot of different reasons. I’m glad you did, too.”

“Yeah.” Quentin nods. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring it — I would’ve, if I’d known you were coming today.”

Kady waves this off. “Keep it. It’s a good reminder to have around. I have enough of those.” She half-smiles. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll find someone who needs it more than you, pay it forward.”

That sounds unlikely at best, considering just how far he is from where he needs, but it seems rude to argue. “Thanks again,” Quentin says.

“Anytime,” she says. “I mean that.”

*

Luisa is like totally rejuvenated by their trip to Portland, having determined about thirty seconds after Penny dropped them off in San Diego that organizing a local spellshare is a suitable Something to do with her newfound free time and in short order convinced the rest of the house they can host it at home, so. That’s nice for her. It’s nice to have connected her with something helpful, considering that he doesn’t like to think about this but he’s pretty sure he might be dead by now if she hadn’t talked to him at a party that first night last June. Nice things all around, and the fucking coffee maker, stubbornly unfixable, sucks the air out of all of them. Possibly it was a mistake to assign so much symbolic weight to his ability to pull off untested and theoretically novel magic, but it’s too late now to take it back. It looms behind his every waking thought like some dark metonym for all his failures.

He takes another day off, after the spellshare, halfheartedly blaming the previous day’s exertion but knowing in his heart he just doesn’t want to; then another. He tells himself that with all the time he’s not spending figuratively bashing his head against concrete trying to make himself think he’ll do something healthy and productive, like try yet again to run for twenty minutes straight, or go to yoga with Luisa, or pick up the guitar gathering dust in his closet and give it another go, but instead he mostly bums about a series of locations — his room, the porch, a spot on the beach even though it’s cold enough by San Diego standards that his fingers start going numb — listening to _From a Basement on the Hill_ and smoking and counting down the hours until it’s a socially acceptable time to be seen with a beer in his hand. _Last stop for a resolution_ — _end of the line, into confusion_ … He returns almost unconsciously to the barren rectangle of soil by the side of the house, seeing in the dirt a grave for whatever brief flurry of hope had made him think he could do this and by extension anything, anything good at all.

God, does he have to mope so _dramatically_ , like every time?

Ray comes out to tend to the plants, gives Quentin a quick wave, then squints. “Didn’t you say you were quitting?”

Quentin sighs and puts the cigarette out on the wooden frame. “I’m moving to France.”

*

He wakes up hungover for a third day in a row and somewhere beneath the queasiness and the headache is a voice in his head sounding an alarm that says _Three makes a trend_.

Quentin ignores this voice because, like, what, are we the _New York Times_ Style section here? He rolls onto his side, burying his face in his arm against the day.

But the voice persists, and so does the uncomfortable stew of guilt and worry it brings, where he feels like he’s fucked something up even though nothing bad has happened, and he’s mad at himself for overreacting and mad at himself for having given himself a reason, or like a shitload of reasons, to overreact to, like, probably less alcohol consumed over the past three days than he was going through in a few hours last summer when it was bad, for some vague indefinable notion of _it_ , it’s not a big deal, people, like normal functional people, wake up hungover and they don’t panic about it because it doesn’t matter, so — it’s fine. He’s going to take some Advil and drink some water and go back to sleep and then wake up later feeling fine.

Quentin opens his eyes. The book Kady gave him is on the nightstand.

It doesn’t matter, Quentin thinks; nothing matters. It doesn’t matter if he sleeps past noon and wiles away the daytime hours determinedly doing nothing to solve a problem that doesn’t need solving, that only even exists as a problem because he was dumb enough to want to make it his problem, as a distraction from all his actual problems, and he doesn’t even want it anymore, because he doesn’t want anything, so —

 _It’s a good reminder_ , she’d said; a reminder about choices, and fear. A reminder that whatever you think you’ll find on the other side of that secret door, it’s never there. A reminder that it does matter, every time you choose to run.

He thinks about Margo on the porch: the hurt in her eyes, left there by him because he’d been so convinced it couldn’t matter, what he did.

“Ugh,” Quentin groans aloud, and reaches for his phone.

He sends a quick text with an invitation to call, hating himself a little for it but knowing he’ll likely hate himself more later if he doesn’t. He kind of wishes he didn’t know that, but apparently it’s not that easy to forget. Then he rushes through the Advil and water to get back to bed. He’s bought himself some time, at least; now when he closes his eyes he can say he’s waiting, instead of giving up.

*

The phone rings like ninety seconds later, because there is no mercy in this cruel world.

“Hello,” Quentin manages fuzzily, eyes still closed.

“Quentin! My man!” Josh sounds as inexplicably delighted to hear from him as he always does. It is way too much pep for this early in the morning, time zones or no. “So great to be talking with you, wow, it’s been forever. How’s things?”

“Things are… fine,” Quentin euphemizes, but only slightly. Probably. He hopes. “How, uh. How are you?”

“Oh I’m great,” says Josh. “Stressing a little about these magic outages in Fillory, but they’ve avoided Whitespire so far, knock wood. And I’m sure Margo will figure it out. Fen and Twenty-Three are due to report their findings back any day now, so that’ll be a big help.”

“Cool,” Quentin says, hoping that’s a suitable amount of pleasantries. “So, listen — I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind talking over this spell with me — Margo said —”

“ _Mind?_ ” Josh laughs incredulously. “Are you kidding? I’m like, beyond flattered. Margo told me you’re working with inanimate cultivation? That’s some cutting-edge shit, dude.”

How is he so enthusiastic about everything? What part of his brain is missing that makes that possible, and are there doctors who will remove it on request? “Sort of,” Quentin says. “Or — yeah, I guess that’s what I’m trying for. And the thing is it _worked_ , right, I fixed — or I cultivated — this plate, from just a piece of it.”

“That’s _so_ rad.”

“Yeah it — it actually was pretty rad,” Quentin concedes. That was why he’d wanted to keep going, right? Because it was so — rad, what he’d managed to do? “Only — the original plan was to fix this coffee maker, and I can’t — I mean I knew it wouldn’t be the same, but I’ve modified the spell dozens of different ways and I can’t get it to work even badly. Like it’s just giving me _nothing_. So — I don’t really know where to go from here, if I should start from scratch, or — if you could help me troubleshoot, or think of something I haven’t tried yet, that’d be — great.”

“Could I see a copy of the spell?” Josh says. “It’ll be easier for me to process that way — I’m kind of a visual learner.”

“Sure, one sec.” Quentin painfully hoists himself upright to reach for his laptop and forward Josh the last draft in his sent mail, which he’d sent to Julia before casting to fix the plate. “Should be in your inbox.”

“Alright, let’s see her.” There’s a silence as Josh reads through his work, which Quentin finds unaccountably nerve-wracking, like he’s going to give it a grade. Instead he says, “Damn, your shit is legit. I’m almost a little jelly, to be honest.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, somehow as uncomfortable with praise as he was with silent judgment. “Thanks.”

Josh says, “So what have you been doing to maintain it?”

Quentin frowns. “To — what?”

“This is your planting spell, right?” Josh says. “So you cast this, and then — what do you do on the days before it’s blooming? You know — watering, fertilizing — not literally, I assume, although small objects are _not_ my specialty, obviously — but that kind of thing.”

“Uh… “ Quentin shakes his head, feeling slightly idiotic. “I guess I haven’t really been doing anything.”

“Ahhh,” Josh says sagely. Quentin rolls his eyes, equal parts annoyed and embarrassed. “Well, there’s the first part of your answer.”

Quentin picks at his cuticle in irritation. “Are you sure? I mean — I didn’t do anything for the plate. I just planted it and three days later it was ready to go.”

“Yeah, but that’s a _plate_ ,” Josh says, in the tones of a very earnest high school math teacher who really wants the class to understand _why_ C was the right answer. Quentin briefly regrets every life choice that led him to this moment. “Like I said, it’s not my field, but I gotta figure, on the neediness scale, plates are probably around the black-eyed peas of small objects, right?”

“Sure,” Quentin says. He doesn’t know anything about black-eyed peas, except that he killed a _bunch_ of them in a doomed fifth-grade science experiment. Maybe he should have thought of that before he embarked on this path.

“Something as complex as a coffee maker is going to be more like — an orchid,” Josh says. “Or gardenias.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, trying not to sound annoyed, “so that means…”

“It’s going to be a lot needier,” Josh says. “You can’t just set it and forget it, because growing this puppy isn’t going to be a one-and-done deal. You need to tend to it continually.”

“With what?”

“I mean —” Josh chuckles. “That’s the fucking question, isn’t it? For botanical stuff we have reams of best practices here. Inanimate cultivation is a whole new adventure. But there’s some overlap. I can look up some articles for you in recent publications you might want to read, ask some old Naturalism buddies of mine, send you a list of suggestions to try.”

“Okay, yeah, that’s be — that’d be great,” Quentin says, trying to muster the gratitude he knows he should feel.

Josh continues, “You’ll also probably want to maximize power in your cycle.”

Quentin massages his temples. “And how do I do that?”

“The easiest way to boost power is to be savvy about your circumstances,” Josh says. “Good rule of thumb? Plant on the new moon, harvest on the full.”

“So that would be…”

“Pretty sure it’s tonight,” Josh says brightly.

Quentin huffs a laugh. “So, great, I just need to figure out the fucking farmers’ almanac essentials of growing a coffee maker and acquire them, all in the next sixteen hours.”

“More like ten hours or so,” Josh says, “typically for a casting-charged sowing you want to plant right around sunset, if possible. And you’ll want to adjust the duration features in your spell, to really get the most out of the growing period, but that’s an easy fix. Don’t sweat the other stuff, either — you’ll probably be fine, or maybe even better off, waiting a day or two, and you definitely don’t want to dump it all at once. Oh — although, there is one thing that might boost your casting, if you can find it. Do you think you can get your hands on some worm castings?”

“Weirdly,” Quentin says, “yeah. I definitely can.”

“Oh, that’ll be a _big_ help,” Josh enthuses. “Just adding those babies and the lunar synching would probably get you further than you’ve gone. But of course, we want to up our chances of success as high as possible, right?”

Quentin bristles at that _we_ , even though what he’s saying is true. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Quentin sighs, runs a hand through his hair. Then, reluctantly, he stands up to get dressed while Josh keeps talking, because pulling this shit together is going to take every minute he’s got.

*

Josh was — ugh — right: the duration modifications take some brute-forcing on the calculation side, but overall they’re an easy fix. And Toni is _thrilled_ that someone is getting into the myriad uses of worm castings. Quentin adds them to his latest batch of planting mix, trying not to think too hard about what they are — god, nature is disgusting — and heads out at sunset to bury another broken-off piece of black plastic, following Josh’s suggestion to return to his original spell sequence as a kind of clean slate on which to try whatever new maintenance protocol.

He can tell halfway through the casting that something’s different; there’s a connection that wasn’t there before, something latching together or hooking into its proper slot that reminds him of the plate but has been missing from his marathon of failures. It shocks him so much he almost drops it, but he manages to hold on, taking an extra moment to just — appreciate it. To remember that he’s doing this because he did something good, and it felt right. Then — wingtip-cross — he sets it down. To rest, or, hopefully, to grow.

*

Trying to cram as much understanding of basic cultivation theory as he can into the two weeks before the next full moon gives him more of a direction than he’d been able to get from his increasingly desperate flailing with spell variations. His task keeps him rooted at his desk, reading through articles Josh sent over and taking notes by hand, or sends him biking across the city to niche apothecaries staffed by women with purple irises selling strange-smelling dried herbs. In the mix of reading and moving and going out to the patch of soil where magic is brewing to dust some moonstone shavings or pour a few drops of dragon’s spit (repeat: nature is _disgusting_ ), some anxiety he hadn’t named subsides.

The work is like a skeleton for his life: the rest of his days fall into place around it. He starts week nine yet again, listening to _Haughty Melodic_ and relieved to discover that if he still can’t go further his days off have at least not killed his hard-won ability to run for five minutes without dying; he decides to do it once more through, figuring at this moment he could use the reassurance of a sure thing. He buys a copy of Mike Doughty’s book, which turns out to be half a memoir about heroin addiction and half an amazingly bitter exercise in shit-talking his former bandmates, and winds up buying a copy to give to Kady, when he gets the chance. He returns to book club on a day Marcia’s brought an article about new experiments in music magic and in the chatter over snacks later while Jenny is teasing Luisa about the bassist Tess winds up teaching him a guitar-tuning spell, and he uses it so that he can watch guitar tutorials online secure in the knowledge that the hideous strangled-cat-down-a-flight-of-stairs sounds his fingers are painfully wringing from the strings may be ugly and might not legally qualify as “music” but at the least are technically in tune.

So maybe Luisa had a point, about needing something to do; maybe that’s the same thing as deciding to do something, viewed from a different side, and doing something is still key. Maybe he’s already figured some things out, about how to be less broken. Maybe he knows what he needs to do, and living it over and over is the way to make it real. At yoga, lying in corpse pose with his palms turned up, he ignores whatever the fuck Alana is saying about connecting to the prehistoric layers beneath their sacrums to tune into the magic and lights up that awareness, that listening for the not-sound that’s always around him, and his eyes open in surprise when he feels water in his left hand. Just a few drops, but it’s a start. He compiles a list of books in the reference notes of articles he’s reading and a few more volumes on residue theory, just in case, and asks Alice without thinking twice if she can help him out, and when Penny arrives to drop off the new set and pick up the old ones, Quentin hesitates for just a moment before adding the Mike Doughty book to the pile.

“For Kady,” he explains, probably unnecessarily; “since — I just thought she might like it.”

“I bet she will,” Penny says. Quentin’s, like, ninety-five percent sure he’s not being sarcastic. “I’ll pass it on.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says, brushing some hair out of his eyes. He’s not used to Penny being more or less nice to him, but — he’s doing things, right, tracing new paths, because he’s trying to be who he’s supposed to be and that person probably must be better than he was, so he says, “Hey, uh — do you want to like. Stay for dinner? We’re doing like a — a Taco Tuesday kind of deal.”

“Oh,” Penny says, visibly surprised. “Thanks, but I… can’t.”

“Right,” Quentin says, trying not to look embarrassed; obviously Penny doesn’t want to eat fucking tacos with him in San Diego. “Yeah, sorry, I —”

“It’s just — I’m going to a movie with Frankie,” Penny says. “This theater downtown is doing a big-screen showing of _Die Hard_. We already bought the tickets. Well, technically Frankie won them in an online sweepstakes he never entered, but. Works out the same, kinda.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, uncertain.

“But, you know.” Penny shrugs, shifts his weight from one foot to another like he doesn’t really know where the fuck this conversation is going either. “Maybe… next time?”

Quentin nods, hopefully casually. “Yeah. Yeah, maybe.”

“Cool,” Penny says. “I’ll see you around, man.”

And then he’s gone, leaving Quentin to his work. To the things he has already, if he can just remember they’re there.

*

He’s walking along the beach, trying to clear his head before returning to his pros and cons list of straight hydration versus some kind of mineral infusion in the last few days before a timed bloom, when the thought comes unbidden into his head: Eliot would love this.

Quentin freezes where he stands, because like — Eliot _would_. Secretly he can nerd out as much as anyone on the topic of new ways to get magic to do what you want it to do. He used to blow off homework to work on perfecting the tut sequence to tidy up the frosting on a tray of miniature cupcakes, which was one of the first things Quentin learned about him that made him feel like they could really be friends. In Fillory, after they’d been there long enough to admit it had become home, he would futz around with little spells for fun; he liked having guests for the chance to show off, but he liked too talking possibilities in the evenings with Quentin, after Teddy had gone to bed.

It — hurts, the way it always hurts, to think of him and remember what was; it hurts to know that even in this life there was a time Quentin would have been telling Eliot about this process through every step. But it feels different, months after he’d lain about nearly comatose with grief for what they’d lost, now that he’s brought himself back from not quite the ledge and gone out and brought himself back again. It’s a duller ache, a fading bruise. Like he’d dropped his love rough and ragged into the sea, and the sea in its movement and its power had started smoothing the edges into something soft and small enough to hold in your hand without breaking the skin.

Tragedy plus time. It’s not funny, but it was beautiful once; Quentin can see that, without wanting to run from what it means. They made something beautiful together, a love of a kind he’s not sure he’ll ever have again or even still can, and now it’s gone and he’s still here. Holding on and letting go, carrying it with him alongside all the other pieces filling up his life. Maybe he didn’t need to get rid of it; maybe he just needed to adjust his life until it fit tidily in the place of memory it belongs to now. Like listening to the magic: finding a new way to look at something that’s always there.

He tunes into the ambient, then; the strands he’s been poking at are stronger, or brighter, or louder here, so close to the bay. On a whim he cups his palms, left hand on top, and closes his eyes, and just — keeps listening. To the pulse of the waves rolling onto the sand, the rhythm of the magic moving in and around him. The familiar shape of what he’s been learning to listen for, which feels a little closer to his every time he tries. Living with the magic over and over until it’s real. Like running, or like working with his hands to make something out of wood or paper or ink: his body adjusting to what needs to be done. Like living with his broken heart until it no longer feels like a wound.

At the center of his palms — water. Spreading outward, filling up the space he’s made for it. He opens his eyes, careful to keep his connection to the magic active, and watches it reach the edges of his index fingers, start spilling over the sides, running down the backs of his hands.

Eliot would love this, he thinks; it hurts, but already it hurts less than the last time. Like in this at least he’s finally doing what he needs to do: moving on.

He drops the spell, noticing that even after he’s closed it out he can feel the magic at his edges, hot and familiar. Then he opens his hands, letting the water fall onto the sand beneath him, and turns with a smile to walk back home.

*

Sometime around his thirtieth or so allegedly casual stroll by the garden box containing his spell on the day of the full moon, the tell-tale little blue flower sprouts up, and when Quentin spots it, his heart starts to pound.

It wouldn’t bloom if he had fucked this up, right? The way he set it up, he’s pretty sure, it couldn’t. And he knew, he could _feel_ when he planted it and in the days of caring for it since that the magic he’d directed had caught like a match, was doing _something_ there, underneath the dirt. So — well. Only one way to find out.

Quentin plucks the flower and digs into the bed, pushing aside the soil and the grains of stone and the dead herbs placed there carefully to make something whole, to turn a broken piece of plastic into — his hand hits something hard and smooth and he can hardly breathe from nerves and excitement —

He pulls out something large and boxy and — his heart sinks — absolutely not a coffee maker.

It looks like a coffee maker, kind of — like a coffee maker made by a Martian who was working from photographs, and had no idea what it was for. Or like a coffee maker mock-up created by pouring plastic into a single mold. The shape of it is right enough, and the colors — but there’s no components, no way to make it work. It’s all one unbroken piece, a sheet of undifferentiated material stretched to the appropriate dimensions but not altered in any way that would restore its function.

Fuck, Quentin thinks; “Fuck,” he says out loud, kicking the wooden frame in frustration hard enough that it hurts his toe. “Fucking _fuck_ ,” he says again, mad at himself and mad at the wood and mad at the coffee maker that refuses to become itself.

He really thought he might have it. He didn’t even know how true that was, until it turned out he was wrong.

In spite Quentin throws his useless artifact to the ground where it bounces, apparently unscathed. He curses one more time, then starts walking down the street to buy a pack of cigarettes.

*

He’s trying to run for twenty minutes straight, it’s almost March already and he hasn’t managed even this, he’s starting week ten yet again and he’s so sick of always fucking starting. He’s less than halfway through and his lungs are burning, probably because he spent yesterday evening chain-smoking while picking at the failed spell like a scab, which is just a more specific way of saying it’s because his body sucks because he can’t stop doing stupid shit, which is just a more specific way of saying that he fucks things up because he’s a dumbass, and like — he just feels so fucking _stupid_. Stupid for trying to run for twenty goddamn minutes, stupid for failing at it, like, repeatedly, and yet not getting the message. Stupid for his useless spell, who cares if he could fix a _plate_ , a plate doesn’t _do_ anything and he can’t turn his magic into anything that matters, and he feels so stupid for thinking he could have. Stupid for believing there was actually some corner partly turned, like a couple weeks spent above the bare minimum of not-dying was anywhere near having an actual life, stupid for thinking it was different this time, because he’s in California and he fixed a fucking plate. For placing faith in his endless starts that never turn into anything real. Stupid for fooling himself into forgetting that it’s always the same old shit. Falling always for the story he wants to believe, the one where he’s okay, the one where he can be —

— yeah, fuck it, he’s not doing this.

*

Back at the house, a couple beers in, he drags the simulacrum coffee maker out from where he’d bitterly shoved it into the closet the day before. Looking at it he’s certain he hates having this more than if he’d landed on another dead end; he feels like it’s taunting him, so close to what he wanted and yet so inadequate. A start that’s worse than nothing, like all of them which only ever lead back here. Back to his self that won’t just fucking _work_.

He kicks at the thing, swaying uneasily atop the anger roiling beneath him, then kicks at it again, harder. He wants to break it, he wants to smash it into useless pieces to reveal it for what it really is. He picks it up and swings it against the wall, again and again, beats at it with the hammer he’s been using to chip at the original one piece at a time, pounding as hard as he can on something that won’t shatter or crack or give. In desperation he backs up and throws it like he threw the plates, like he threw the planes, feeling as ugly and monstrous as he always does beneath whatever bullshit he hides behind, and the fucking thing won’t break. Won’t dent, won’t chip, won’t even scratch.

Of all the worthless things to survive —

Whatever. He throws the wasted object back into the closet, putting some real force behind it for good measure, and lights another cigarette.

*

Quentin wakes up hungover for the third day in a row and for the love of god he cannot figure out why his body is betraying him by sending him back to nominal consciousness when every cell is screaming to stay in the sweet sweet dark. Possibly it has to do with the giant mosquito buzzing next to his head. Or — Quentin cracks one eye open, groans. Not a mosquito; much worse. His phone.

He gropes for the device, intending to ignore the call because surely Julia or whatever not-Julia person is inexplicably calling him can wait until sometime other than asscrack o’clock, but when he glimpses the screen trying to maneuver his clumsy fingers into hanging up the shock of the name confuses him into answering. “Josh?”

“Hey, dude!” Josh is _unforgivably_ cheerful in the midst of this assault. “I didn’t wake you, did I? Kinda forgot about the time difference, truth be told.”

“I’m —” Quentin can’t process a question and the fact of the call simultaneously, so he drops it. “What’s going on?”

“I wanted to follow up,” Josh chirps, like this is a normal, obvious thing for him to do. “I would’ve called earlier, but things have been getting a little real over in Fillory, and not in the heartwarming Pinocchio way.” 

“Follow up,” Quentin repeats. “On…”

Josh gives a light little scoff. “Uh, on the totally awesome experimental magic we’ve been talking about for two weeks?”

“Oh.” Right. That. “Yeah, it, uh — it failed.”

“Bummer.” Josh sounds sincerely sympathetic and yet not remotely bummed enough for Quentin’s liking. “Another non-starter?”

“No, actually, it —” Why is he having this conversation? “It just didn’t work.”

“Like how?”

“Why does it matter,” Quentin says, annoyed.

“Because,” Josh says, “that’ll help us figure out what to do next.”

What the fuck is he talking about? “There’s no _next_ ,” Quentin snaps. “It doesn’t fucking work, okay? I did everything you told me, I did all of it right, I followed the fucking phases of the moon and instead of a coffee maker it spit out this — I don’t even know how to describe it. Like a cheap Happy Meal version of the actual thing.”

“Wow,” Josh breathes. “That’s fascinating.”

“Yeah, well,” Quentin grumbles, “I’m glad my failure is so theoretically interesting to you.”

“ _Failure!_ ” Josh gives an incredulous laugh. “You went from zilch to some kind of proportional copy situation.”

“Great,” says Quentin, “I invented a magical 3D printer.”

“Hey, come on, man,” Josh says. “We’re just getting started.”

Quentin grits his teeth. “Maybe I don’t feel like getting fucking started.”

“But this is the fun part,” Josh protests. “This is where the magic happens, pun not intended. The lunar circumstances, the daily tending, that’s your baseline. That stuff’s checking boxes. And not to brag, but with my expertise you must have checked a lot of the right boxes, because you got a hell of a lot closer than you’d been. Now, though — now we get to move into _optimizing_. This is where it really becomes an _art_.” He chuckles. “You think my bell peppers woke up like this? With that depth of flavor? No way, Jose. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were my nightshade crops.”

Margo has sex with this person, Quentin thinks. Margo Hanson. She has sex with him on _purpose_. “A kitchen appliance that’s found a whole new way to be broken isn’t exactly the same as a mediocre pepper.”

“Either way,” Josh says, “cultivation is the tortoise’s race, my friend. If I gave up every time one of my blooms didn’t turn out the way I wanted, I wouldn’t have made it through my first year at Brakebills. You gotta learn to love the process. And trust me, once you’ve really immersed yourself in it, you will. This is the good shit.”

Quentin is about to tell him where he can shove his precious fucking _process_ , but before his hazy brain can assemble the words right Josh says, “Oh shit, Margo needs me — either duty or booty calls, and those are the two masters I faithfully serve.” Gross. Quentin involuntarily pulls a face. “If I’m not around today, I’m gonna be on Earth like all next week for family wedding shit, so call when you have a chance, okay? I’ve got some ideas for what you might want to try.”

“I’m not gonna —” Quentin starts, but Josh has already hung up.

Well. He’ll get the message sooner or later. Quentin certainly has. He turns off his phone and closes his eyes in relief.

*

He wakes up hungover a fourth day in a row and the alarm bells are back with their tinny concern and the same argument is happening again in his head without any conscious input whatsoever about how it’s fine actually or in fact no it’s not or it’s no big deal or stop lying to yourself or — god, he’s so fucking sick of this. It’s going to keep happening, Quentin knows, until he shuts it up in one of two ways, so he might as well get that over with. He opens his eyes, catching the spine of Kady’s book on the night stand, and takes a moment to glare at it resentfully; a part of him really, really wishes he weren’t about to do this. But he’d rather do it than admit any of the things he’d have to consider admitting if he didn’t, so he announces “Fine, I’m getting up” to the empty room and shoves himself upright. Option A it is.

Washing his hair for the first time in — let’s not put a number to it — it occurs to him that maybe he’s been unrealistic, with his resolutions and his plans. Maybe his irritation is just the same old starry-eyed dreaming that’s always kept him stuck, set apart from the real world just enough that he never learned to deal with it. Wasn’t that half his problem, not just as a kid who kept putting off growing up but at the Seam — falling once more for a glossy lie about who he was meant to be. Of course reality is going to be disappointing, if he’s always fooling himself with the hope of some impossible triumph. What he needs is to learn to live with that. Nothing is ever going to feel as good as dying; being an adult means he needs to stop waiting for the thing that does, and falling apart when it doesn’t arrive.

And maybe, he thinks, brushing his teeth and getting dressed and putting away the laundry that’s started sprawling weed-like on his floor, maybe he is figuring it out. Because he could have dived right back into the abyss that’s always waiting for him, but he stepped back from the ledge and then stepped back again. That’s what he came to California to do, right? To stop destroying himself and everything else in the blast radius? Fixing the coffee maker or running three miles or quitting smoking — those would be nice, maybe, but that’s not going to get him closer to the person he’s supposed to be. It’s better to set them aside than to use them as another excuse to escape. If he abandons those half-baked resolutions and looks at the rest of his life — he’s doing pretty okay. He’s not one of his impressive friends, bursting with projects and plans. He’s just a guy trying to get through the day without imploding. Maybe he’s fixed his life as much as he can ask for, by not breaking down every time it gets hard. Maybe he should just focus for a while on keeping that streak going as long as he can.

When Quentin thinks about that it feels — disappointing, and bitter, and humiliating, and small, but — that’s life.

*

So he kind of decides to stop trying. Not — okay, stated like that, it sounds bad. He’s still trying to get his shit together; he’s just taking a more mature view of what that might realistically entail. Yes to folding his underwear and limiting his use of mood-altering substances, not so much to crowding his days with activities that mostly just feed into and prolong his fantasies of metamorphosis into something other than his thoroughly mediocre self. He’s working on accepting his life isn’t special, and there’s no grand twist coming to prove otherwise. It feels — not great, but not awful. Not much of anything, really. There’s a bit of a sting that’s tempered by the sense that he’s finally figured something out. Anyway with him it’s probably better, actually, to ditch the constant veering between extremes and settle instead into something steady and safe.

He hangs around for a few days, doing not much. He scrolls aimlessly through the internet and watches episodes of TV shows he’s seen before; he lies around until he’s stiff and then he relocates to the living room or goes for a walk, maybe. He considers picking up the guitar, but he can’t really see why he’d bother. He plans to go to book club but he falls asleep instead and doesn’t really mind. He smokes cigarettes when he feels like it and weed when he’s bored or if someone’s around to smoke with, and he wakes up feeling fine. He’s doing fine. And for Quentin, that’s like basically the same as doing great.

He’s interrupting a long afternoon of playing 2048 on his phone to make a turkey sandwich when Luisa swings by the kitchen and says, “Hey, are you coming tomorrow?”

Quentin looks up from the bag of provolone. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, the spellshare, remember?” Luisa leans against the kitchen doorway, holding a mug of tea in her hands.

“Oh, right.” It’s not that he’d forgotten it was happening so much as he’s kind of emptied out his calendar enough that he’s not a hundred percent clear on what day it is. 

She fidgets with the white dangling string of the teabag, looks into the mug. “No pressure, but also, now that we’ve crossed T minus twenty-four hours and counting I’ve switched from being super psyched to being half psyched and half unreasonably nervous, so.”

“Nervous?” Quentin says, frowning. “About what?”

“Oh, you know.” She shrugs a little too hard. “What if no one comes, what if like one person comes and they think it’s so lame that only one person came that they tell everyone about how lame it was, what if a bunch of people come but they all hate it and think it’s totally stupid and I become a laughingstock and have to change my name and flee the country, yadda yadda. The usual.”

“Luisa —” Quentin starts, baffled, but she waves him off.

“No, I know, like I said, it’s totally unreasonable, and like — I’m going to be insane for the next day and then it’s going to actually start and be great and I’ll be fine. That’s how it goes. But.” She chews at her bottom lip. “It would be cool if I knew that you were going to be there. For like, moral support or whatever.”

Okay, so the thing is — he had not been planning to be there. He had been planning to be in his room, with headphones on, possibly sleeping, or _maybe_ walking somewhere for a sandwich or whatever, because when he thought about, like, all those people, and doing things, it seemed like a lot of effort for nothing much. But she looks like really nervous, which is not a feeling he associates with her, which is kind of funny come to think of it because she was definitely nervous, like, the very first time they ever talked, but — anyway he doesn’t really want to go, but he doesn’t want to be a shitty friend either, and for some reason this seems important to her, so he says, “Yeah, of course.”

She lets out a relieved little exhale through her lips. “Awesome.”

“I mean,” he adds, fumbling for a joke to cover for some vague anxiety bubbling in him, “I do literally live here, so. The odds I’d be there were pretty high.”

Luisa rolls her eyes. “No, I know, but there’s being there and _being there_ , and like, everyone else will be there but you’re the one who got me started on this whole thing, so — you know?”

“Yeah,” he says, which — sort of? He sort of knows, maybe. He thinks he knows the shape of this anxiety, and it’s guilt, which — why? Quentin gives her what he hopes is an encouraging smile. “I’ll be there. In every sense.”

She grins. “Thanks. Seriously. This has been like a total life-saver for me, historically I really don’t do great with tons of unstructured time.” She glances at the clock on the microwave and sets the mug in the sink. “Shit, I gotta get to the post office before they close — I’ll see you later?”

Quentin nods, then says after her, “Hey — let me know if you need help setting up, or whatever.”

“Will do,” she calls back, already halfway out the door.

*

He can’t shake the guilt, after; it keeps knocking at the back of his mind while he eats his sandwich and spells the dishes clean and resumes his 2048 marathon and abandons 2048 to sit on the porch steps smoking and staring at the bay. Which makes no sense because he didn’t do anything wrong — she asked him to come, and he said yes. And he will, because he’s doing fine, which was like the whole point. A completely ordinary conversation looping like Poe’s fucking raven croaking nevermore, an easy acquiescence for a minor request soon to be fulfilled. She never even knew he’d been planning to skip. And even if she had known, that wouldn’t mean anything. Like, how the fuck was he supposed to know she cared if he showed up?

— Oh. “Shit,” Quentin says out loud, hanging his head. He’s a fucking idiot. It’s not Luisa he feels guilty about.

Why the fuck didn’t he go to Margo’s coronation?

Their conversation back in January floats back to him. She was right; he’d been a couple months fresh out of the grave and self-medicating to the point of stupefaction, but — that wasn’t enough. If there had been anything he could have pulled it together for, it should have been this. And as fucked as his head had been, he still believes that he would have managed it, if he’d managed to understand that she cared if he did. But he hadn’t. Everything they had ever been to each other, every Brakebills barbecue and half-assed plan, every brief soft moment when things were hard and no one else was around — he’d thrown all of it away, because he hadn’t thought it was worth anything to her. Margo, who — he fucking _knows_ her. He knows how hard she holds on.

That’s the real mystery here. With everything she is, and everything they’d shared — why had it been so easy for him to believe she’d let him go?

The questions make him feel queasy with their blankness. Like if he can’t explain this even to himself, he can’t guarantee he won’t do it again. Quentin stares at the waves like they might bring him an answer, but nothing rises from the depths. It’s just the water, beneath the surface as inscrutable as his own self, doing what it always does. Unthinking, automatic. Like a habit, or a ghost.

*

For the spellshare — “This _inaugural_ spellshare,” she tells the crew assembled in the living room in a winkingly hopeful tone — Luisa’s kept it simple, a trial run. The invite list is just whoever they managed to reach by word of mouth, and although Quentin’s content to hang back as a wallflower — nothing about moral support seems to entail the requirement of actual interaction, especially once the event is underway and Luisa’s nerves seem to be gone — it’s kind of nice to look around and realize most of the faces are familiar from book club or game night or Saturday dinners. It makes him feel sort of warm; he winds up making appropriate cooing noises over pictures of Marcia’s cats and admitting to Tess he hasn’t been using the tuning spell much lately.

The loose theme is light spells; Luisa told him earlier she’d like to think in the future about how to make these useful but wanted to start off with something low-stakes and fun. People demonstrate and help each other learn portable lamps, heatless candles, tricks for extending the use of a burned-out bulb, all manner of decorative sparklers in an array of colors and shapes. There’s a playfulness in the air, a fizzy vibe of delight and curiosity which proves contagious, drawing Quentin in against his expectations. The spells people bring are a mix of the classical tutting Brakebills trained him in and the looser, more improvisational casting he’s been working to wrap his mind around; he joins a trio trying to learn to skywrite short notes in neon pink cursive and is pleased to discover that he finds the right strain of magic easily, almost like it was lying in wait.

Watching so many locals cast in quick succession or side by side, Quentin feels like he can finally see what Luisa mentioned back when he’d first asked about this type of magic that was not quite the magic he knew: the spells span the range of tuts and other maneuvers, but the ones manipulating it by feel will add in a base sequence or index crook to close the gap to where they need to go, while even the most textbook-precise tutters dip occasionally into something else, even if it’s just to broaden the reach of a spell at the very end as if to see where it might go. He finds himself fascinated, watching and thinking about how much more there is to magic than what he’d been taught, all the different paths that led people through spells and incantations and charms and enchantments until they wound up here, every one of them creating something lovely, no two casting precisely the same way — like, it’s just so fucking cool. Quentin knows he wouldn’t be able to appreciate it if he hadn’t spent months spent tugging at rudimentary magic that wouldn’t bend for him, and he’s so glad suddenly that he did, so he can really take it in: what magic looks like, for people happy to let it spread as far as it can go. As things are wrapping up, Book Club Jenny claps her hands and directs everyone into a circle. “Alright,” she announces, “we’re closing out with a game, okay? This one’s gonna sound familiar to my camp counselor alums and theater nerds —”

“ _Former_ theater nerds,” someone interjects.

“— Hate to break it to you, Casey, but no such thing.” The group laughs, Quentin included even though he’s pretty sure he’s said that to Eliot, almost verbatim, more than once. Maybe some parts could be funny one day after all. “I’m gonna get it started while I explain the rules, so feel me out, so we’re all tuned in — it’ll work best if it’s plugged in to all of us. Cecelia’s running tuts if you want to mirror those.” She starts shifting her weight from foot to foot and gathering between her hands a loose, pulsing, prismatic orb of light, refracting rainbows in every direction. Quentin holds his hands out like hers and drops in, or listens, and it takes a moment and a few of the loops Cecelia’s modeling but as others connect their own flow the strand he’s searching out grows brighter, or louder, or comes alive, and he — catches it. Hooked in to the spell, and hooked in to every one of the dozen-odd people running it through, the net of their casting swelling among the ambient, the power running through them and between them and in himself — fuck, that’s a rush. Like — _fuck_.

The game itself is simple, exactly the kind of goofy team-building shit camp counselors use to break the ice the first week in, passing an imaginary charge according to instructions issued through a set of nonsense syllables; the only upgrade to their version is that the charge is real. But the rules aren’t the point; the point is making magic, making magic _together_ , magic for magic’s sake, because it’s fun, because it feels good, it feels fucking electrifying, because it makes them laugh. Because they can _do fucking magic_ and swept away in the collective giddiness Quentin is awestruck in the face of it for the first time in years. He feels so goddamn awake. It’s a buzz that lingers after the game ends, as the guests trickle out to Luisa’s grateful goodbyes while Quentin starts to clean up the scattered remains of snacks and drinks.

“See?” he says once the front door is closed. “Nothing to worry about. That was great.”

She wrinkles her nose before bursting into a grin. “It was, wasn’t it? And I mean — I didn’t seriously expect it to be bad, but. That was really good. People had some good ideas for the theme of the next one, too — I think we can really make this a thing. Hey, um —” She surprises him with a quick tight hug, and he smiles, hugging her back. “Thanks again for coming. It really helped with those first couple minutes where I was on the verge of freaking out.”

And Jesus, Quentin really is an idiot, because it’s not until she says that that he remembers — the best time he’s had in weeks, and he would have missed it, if she hadn’t asked.

*

He can’t fall asleep that night. Some restless agitation keeps running through his body, tensing all his muscles and making it impossible to relax. He keeps switching positions, telling himself to just stay still until his brain gets the message to feel tired, but barely into counting backwards from a thousand or reciting the perfect squares his eyes fling open and his body jerks into a different angle of its own accord and his thoughts veer back to the same ricocheting echo in the same dark pit. Eventually he sits up in defeat, slumped over his knees. He considers seeking chemical assistance to unwind just enough to drift off and hopefully wake up in the morning refreshed of this latest funk, but that option skirts too close to the edge of the unanswerable question looming in the cartoon cavern of bats he calls a brain.

Why is he so ready to give up?

He had a life that wasn’t much but it was working, as much as it ever had. He had places he was glad to be going and people he was grateful to know and moments that felt good, good like he hadn’t felt in so long. It was solid or at least solidifying in his hands and then — a few off weeks and he was ready to let it dissipate like a mirage. Like he’d dragged himself out of the grave he’d dug himself with scraped-up fingers and aching arms and then at the approach of light beyond the surface he’d loosened his grip. Curling back into himself, skittish and weak, perversely eager for any evidence that the person he was supposed to be was someone who didn’t try for anything beyond what he knew, and who knew a world that was very small. Feeling stupid for believing otherwise, as though he should have known that the other Quentin, the Quentin who’d had the nerve to reach even a little further, the Quentin who wanted to live —

— as though that wasn’t him.

But Quentin knows he can’t blame Eliot for this. He’s been living this story since way before Eliot came around: the one where the best thing he can do is disappear. It goes both ways, with that: he's kept living it and living it, each time adding on to the proof that it was real.

He sits there in the dark, in his room in California, and the thing is he feels stupid either way: stupid for his abortive hopes, stupid for how easily he’d abandoned them. Exhausted to have discovered yet another way he’s trapped himself, another room he’s locked himself in with no apparent way out. Is it always going to be like this, he wonders with a pang of despair; every door opening into another dark chamber, barely closer to the sun. For what, for what, for what — and the temptation is there even now, even when he can see it and put to it a name, thick as a physical presence wrapping around his arms and chest, binding him tight into paralysis, because what’s the point, if it’s so easy for his efforts to dissolve into nothing. If any and all available routes somehow inevitably end here, humiliated and worn out. If he’ll never become the person he’s supposed to be. Why not just stick then to the easiest path.

He’s so fucking tired.

Quentin stretches out his legs and lies on his back and closes his eyes and sees —

— Margo: her steely voice, her wounded face. Come all the way from her goddamn kingdom to California for him, after he’d told himself the story that she didn’t care. Sitting on the porch to remind him — about choices, and regret. About how careless he could be, when he let himself. Remind him —

— it’s not just himself he’s fucking over, when he takes the easy way out.

He stays there for a long minute, feeling it: a choice he can see, that he’s made before. Every direction feels miserable now, in the dark; at the end of every road he sees himself once again feeling exactly this stupid and this small. But it matters, what he chooses. It matters every fucking time.

Quentin sighs and sits up and gets out of bed. “Fuck this,” he says, just to say it; then he gets dressed and digs his sneakers out of the closet where they’ve been hidden unused and laces them up and tiptoes downstairs and slips outside, where he cues up The Mountain Goats to convince himself: _I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me._

Twenty minutes later, he’s finished the first day of week ten: twenty minutes nonstop, jogging at a pace that might be competitive among particularly slow tree sloths. Twenty minutes sweaty and overheated even in the spring night, embarrassed at his own ineptitude; twenty minutes fighting himself to slow down even if he felt idiotic and keep going even though it sucked. Twenty minutes of feeling like his body was made of garbage and second-guessing the value of corporeal form. But twenty minutes done.

He cuts down to the beach to walk back, gasping in exertion as he makes his way home on the sand. There’s a sound coming from the water, and he drifts down to the surf to see if he can make it out — deep voices, strange chords: the selkies down below, singing some ritual song. Or maybe it’s selkie karaoke night, and they’re going to break into All By Myself next. Who the fuck knows, with them. Quentin stands there listening to the alien music, heart still pounding hard. He cups his hands and reaches into the magic; he still hasn’t been able to work the spell further from the bay, but here the water comes quickly, settling into a little pool. He looks down at the dark wavering outline of his face, remembering his shattered reflection at the Seam. How sure he’d been, about what he was going to do. How grateful he’d been for a reason to die.

He can’t make out his features in the water under the starlight. He looks up into the sky, spots the thin fingernail crescent: it’s almost the new moon.

He drops the water onto the sand.

By the time he gets back to the house his pulse has calmed down and he knows three things, each more hideously unwelcome than the last.

The first is that despite his straining muscles and his tight calves and the fact that every single second of it was horrible, now that his body has settled, he feels in fact marginally less terrible than he did before he left, like some mechanic came by and dialed down the tension in his body enough to trick his brain into taking it down half a notch. He even thinks he might be able to sleep.

The second is that he really needs to quit fucking smoking, like, Jesus fucking Christ.

The third is that he needs to call Josh.

*

Josh answers the phone with, “Q-man! Long time no talk!” Because of course he does.

“Yeah, things have been busy around here,” Quentin lies.

“I was starting to worry you’d given up on this totally baller spell design of yours just as things were getting interesting.”

Quentin grits his teeth. “That would pretty fucking dumb of me, huh.”

Josh chuckles. “I know, right?”

“Cool,” Quentin says, closing his eyes for strength. “So, listen — do you have something in mind, that I could try? Because, honestly, I’m out of ideas.”

“I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” Josh says, “and — have you ever heard the line that talking to your plants makes them grow better?”

“No?” Is that a thing? How often do people talk to each other about plants? “Does it work?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that, for sure — some are shy, or sensitive to sound waves, a lot don’t really care — but some species, absolutely it can work,” Josh says. “I tried to look into the research on inanimate cultivation to see if anyone had given it a go there yet, but what I found was more with crystal formations, things like that — didn’t seem too relevant. But I’ve had a lot of success applying it to things like fruit trees — cases where you’re really trying to juice the output, pun not intended. It can make a huge impact on flavor. So for your coffee maker, I think it’s worth trying, because — the spell as it stands got you kind of the equivalent of a bland apple, right? It looks okay, but no one wants to bite into it.”

“Okay,” says Quentin. He’s not convinced by the analogy, but he’s doing this, or whatever, so — sure. “So what, I just — talk to it?”

“Pretty much,” says Josh. “You’ll want to make sure it’s during times you’ve already established a connection — the tail end of your initial casting when you plant is a good time to start, obviously.” Quentin rolls his eyes. _Obviously_. “Beyond that, a few check-ins when you’re gardening can go a long way — really any time you’re using enough magic to set up a link. Just to keep it fresh.”

“And what do I say?” Quentin asks. He’s trying to picture himself crouched by the bed talking to a piece of plastic hidden beneath the soil. The mental image looks… idiotic. “Like, am I assuming it speaks English?”

Josh laughs. “No, of course not. The content doesn’t matter much — honestly sometimes I’ll go out to the orchards at Whitespire and just tell them what’s happening on Twitter. It’s really about your intention. You’re trying to get to where it’s supposed to go, right? So you want to encourage it. Nurture it. Empathize a little. Think Little League coach, or really nice first grade teacher.”

“We are talking about a piece of plastic here,” Quentin says, because the enterprise sounds so absurd. “Like, it’s not even alive.”

“Well, but it’s not _just_ a piece of plastic, right?” says Josh. “If it were, you wouldn’t be going to all this trouble.”

A shot of embarrassment travels down his neck, but — Quentin can’t argue with that. “I’ll give a shot, I guess.”

“Let me know how it goes,” Josh says. “And hey — if this doesn’t help, I’ve got plenty more tricks up my sleeve.”

“Right. Thanks,” Quentin says, already dreading plan C.

*

Kneeling by the edge of the bed of soil once again, Quentin once again prepares the base and once again lays in a piece of black plastic and once again sets his hands to cast: the initiating movements; the incantation; the sequence of tuts to secure the perimeter; and then — he holds it; steadies the magic there; and tries to think.

“So I’m supposed to talk to you,” he says finally. “Apparently it doesn’t really matter what I say, I just need to — encourage you, or whatever, so — maybe I should have just grabbed a book and read it or something, because I don’t really have anything to say. I mean —” He shakes his head. “Look, I don’t get it. Like if I’d fucked up the magic, that’d be one thing, but I don’t — we both know what you're supposed to do, okay, I’ve done this before, it’s my fucking discipline and I’m not actually an idiot about it, I know you — you _want_ to be fixed. Obviously. So, um, no offense, and sorry if this isn’t fucking nurturing enough, but — I don’t really get why you’d pull this uncanny valley titanium bullshit, when you could just — be what you’re supposed to be. Like I might be a fuck-up, but I’m, I’m _trying_ , okay, I’m trying to — to help you, to fix you, and to fix my _life_ , and it fucking sucks sometimes but I’m doing it, okay? Or — mostly, at least. I’m not just — getting halfway there and calling it fucking quits. I’ve, that’s what I’ve decided, no matter how — stupid and exhausting and fucking pointless it feels sometimes, because that’s just — that’s just what you have to do. So — honestly I kind of just want to tell you to suck it the fuck up and do it right this time, but…” He takes a long breath in through his nose. In the distance the sun is dipping towards the waves at the horizon. “But _apparently_ , I’m supposed to — empathize, or whatever. So.”

Quentin stares at the barren dirt and feels a sudden wave of déjà vu: a long time ago, in another world, trying to reach into his heart to offer something to another thing that wouldn’t grow. _Shouldn’t loving the idea of Fillory be enough?_ He gives a short sharp laugh then because — it had been enough, until it hadn’t. Enough to defeat their enemies, but not enough to keep saving his life. Not this time.

“You know the worst part of getting exactly what you want?” he says. “When you look up and see — all the things you traded for it, and you didn’t even know. I could have had everything. I could’ve — saved the world and then just moved _on_ , in Fillory or New York, and I could’ve stayed with Alice, or fucking gotten back together with Eliot, and I would’ve been —” Quentin swallows, throat tight. “And, you know, even after things went down the way they did — god, my friends fucking brought me back from the dead, and I could’ve — I could’ve appreciated that, and just lived my _life_ , instead of… blowing it up and throwing it away. But I woke up and I did what I always fucking do, I started running. Pretending like everything was fine while I was — self-medicating to oblivion, and pushing people away, and just — just being a dick.” Running so hard from all his ugly pieces that he’d left everything worthwhile in the dust.

“I was so fucked up,” he whispers. “And I knew — on some level I must have known, you know? How fucked up I was, and — and had been. For a long time. And I knew — somewhere I knew what I'd done, when I —” How badly it had hurt. Like the hurt was all of him. How easily he'd forgotten everything else he'd ever been, and how quickly he'd jumped at the chance to make it disappear. “And then after — I got back and I did so much fucked up shit and I hurt people so badly so I wouldn’t have to deal with how fucked up I was, and like — for a while it worked, kind of. All the stupid shit I was doing, I almost managed to forget — everything I didn’t want to think about, which was pretty much everything. I could tell myself, okay, this is your life now, and it’s — fine. But — the bad shit wasn’t the only stuff I was forgetting.”

Quentin blinks away a wetness in his eyes; takes a long, shaky breath. “So I guess — I guess I do get it. Why you’d — I guess maybe being broken, that was fucked up for you, and I get — I get why you’d want to come back unbreakable. So that it — it couldn’t happen again, ever. But, um — the issue with that is, it’s not real. It’s not what you really are, or what you’re supposed to be. And it actually doesn’t even work, because it’s not —” He laughs ruefully. “Take it from me, okay, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth giving up everything else you are, just to be — safe. Because, um — I know it might be hard to believe, the way things are now, but — you can actually be more than that. So you should, you know, go for it. And, like — you’re not alone, or whatever. If this doesn’t work, or if you break again, like — I’m not going anywhere.” He says again, a little sturdier, like a promise to the object, or to himself. “I’m not going anywhere. So — so just try, okay? And, um — keep trying. Even when it’s hard. Because it’s worth it, actually. I know — I really fucking know how hard that is to believe, but — it is.”

He considers it a moment longer — the words, the magic, the broken object beneath the dirt. The horizon darkening in the distance. Then he shrugs, figuring that’s as good as he’s got in him for an inspirational speech, and — wingtip-cross — closes it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kady gives Quentin Caroline Knapp's _Drinking: A Love Story_ ; Quentin gives Kady Mike Doughty's _The Book of Drugs: A Memoir_ ; I recommend both, although it's Knapp if you're going to read just one.


	6. Chapter 6

There’s a spell working under the soil where something like a coffee maker is brewing, and it helps, to feel like he’s made a decision that lives in the magic churning in the garden; when Quentin thinks of the little piece of plastic mutating away he feels a steadiness beneath his guts like something has taken root. Something has been fastened, so that the rest of him can move a little freer through the air. Whatever surfaces when the magic’s run its course, he’s determined to call it a next step instead of a failure, because he’s sick of starting over which means he’s sick of giving up, and the ground beneath him has just barely solidified enough that he more or less believes that will stick. And a next step might not be so bad anyway, he tells himself repeatedly; a gap in the spellcraft left to be filled is a chance to return to the work he’s come to appreciate.

In the meantime, though, he’s got two weeks of waiting ahead of him before he’ll get the data that tells him where to move, and he’s got things to return to, book club and jogging and even yoga with fucking Alana babbling about the preverbal wisdom of the reptile brain, but recent experience suggests all of that is more likely to stick around if he’s got something to noodle around with that feels like it could be going somewhere. Something to do that will anchor him in place, so his life can flow around him.

That’s how he finds himself at the dining table, eating some leftover vegetarian stir-fry and looking through a brainstormed list of potential spells to investigate, jotting down notes about the pros and cons of getting going on each one. Making the guitar play itself — the magic’s probably not that hard but it almost definitely requires more musical aptitude than he’s working with. Developing his own hangover cure — history suggests that his talents do not lie in that direction, and that’s maybe not a great situation to be volunteering as a test subject for at this point in his life. Nicotine gum, but make it magic — probably research would quickly turn up that that’s been tried extensively by now, and it would be a hell of a lot of catch-up before he might plausibly be the one to crack it. Nicotine patch, but make it magic — ditto. Nicotine lozenges, but make it magic — same issue. Nicotine spray, but make it magic — see above. Just regular-ass cigarettes but they’re not bad for you, because magic — okay, maybe he’d been distracted when he wrote this. Quentin gnaws at his thumbnail. The internet suggests that cravings peak somewhere between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after quitting, so. Allegedly he’s almost out of the woods. He tries to appreciate Toni’s sauce and focus on the list. Something to introduce Edine to actually good human music — Quentin drums his fingers on the table, considering.

“Hey, Nico,” he says. “You do computer stuff, right?”

Nico looks up from his laptop and his coffee, slides his thick black headphones down around his neck. “I’m a full stack hedge-developer writing the cleanest magic-integrated JavaScript on the West Coast. I cast UI nets so powerful their kids could get into Brakebills and my back-end security code is clean enough to pass a piss test, but sure. Yeah. You could also say I do computer stuff.”

“Cool,” Quentin says, “that’s great. So — is there a way I could use magic to put digital information into something that’s not a computer? Like if I had a, a rock or something, and I wanted to put songs on it to play, like you do on your phone, could I do that?”

Nico scoffs. “Can I whip up a Twitter-scraping data analytics dashboard in Python with a psychic-derived access key that’s compatible with any major OS?”

Quentin stares at him.

Nico rolls his eyes. “Yeah, there’s a way,” he says. “There’s like, multiple ways, and most of them don’t actually require any coding, although obviously the more technically informed ones are more elegant.”

“Uh huh,” Quentin says. “So — like there’s a spell for that?”

Nico shrugs. “I don’t know if anyone’s turned a rock into an iPod specifically, but — the component parts are all out there. I’d assume it’s not that hard to put them together.” He sighs and then in tones of deep magnanimity says, “I can send you some links to get you started on casting with code. If that’s something you’re interested in.”

Feeling a quiet rush swelling in him, Quentin says, “Yeah, I think it is.” He puts a little star next to the item in his notebook, pleased to have selected something to do.

*

So he has a list of sites to pore over, not to mention a playlist to start drafting; he has something to work on, and in the space around that, things to do. He goes back to yoga, feeling like the fact that other people can touch their toes is some kind of prank the universe is playing on him no matter what Alana says about the universe having his back but folding over anyway, feeling the stretch in the back of his legs. He talks over principles of matter transfigurations with book club and then book club goes out for drinks because it’s Jenny’s birthday and he doesn’t notice until he’s drifting off to sleep that he had two mojitos and didn’t have to think about cutting himself off. He strums at a G-chord until his fingers are sore and sometimes it sounds almost like music; he cups his palms and feels the magic and suddenly water is filling his hands and when he vanishes it the magic feels close to him, still, like he doesn’t need to fight for it anymore. He reads Auden. He finishes week ten.

Alice texts him to say that she’ll be doing a site visit in his time zone and does he maybe want her associate (because Alice has associates now) to pick him up so they can get lunch? He’s a little nervous at the thought of seeing her face to face for the first time since he skipped town, but it’s Alice; of course he says yes. She tells him to wear long sleeves.

Quentin’s not sure if he’s waiting for a ride or a summoning out in front of the house, tapping his foot in what is either mild anxiety about hanging out with his ex or ongoing nicotine withdrawl. Possibly both. It turns out it’s a Traveler: a woman with long dreadlocks and a crisp gray suit pops into existence a few feet away, squints at him and asks, “You Quentin? Alice’s friend?”

Alice’s friend. That feels unexpectedly warm to hear. Quentin smiles. “Yeah, that’s me.”

The woman, whose name is apparently Diane, drops him off on a paved path leading up to an active construction site surrounded by trees growing back into their spring green. It’s cooler than San Diego, but not by much; in his hoodie the place is pleasantly brisk.

Alice, watching the construction a few feet away, turns when they arrive. Her face does something funny, like there’s an expression that almost escapes before she tugs her businesslike demeanor back in place. To Diane she says, “Thanks so much.”

“No problem,” says Diane. “Anything else you need?”

Alice shakes her head. “I’m all set, but I think Carlos said something about expecting materials this afternoon — you should probably check with him before you head back to Central.”

“Roger that,” Diane says, and strolls over to the site, donning a hardhat out of nowhere as she gets closer.

Once she’s gone, Alice turns to Quentin. Her mouth flutters into a smile that’s tense but sincere, and through his nerves Quentin feels himself smiling back. “Hey, Q.”

“Hey,” he says back.

“It’s good to see you,” she says, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. She looks him up and down almost too quickly for him to catch. “You look good.”

She sounds like she means it, and she’s glad, or maybe relieved. Quentin swallows. “You, too. I mean it’s good to see you, not that you — although you _do_ look good, not that you wouldn’t, uh, I just —”

“I know,” she says. There’s a tiny laugh in her voice that settles him. “Thanks.”

Alice does look good, obviously. She looks — different, somehow. Same glasses, same long blonde hair — probably the same hair, not that he really notices that kind of stuff — but something else he can’t put his finger on isn’t quite the same. Quentin shrugs it off. It’s been nearly a year. That’s probably all it is. “So where are? And what’s all this?” he asks, gesturing towards the scaffolding and machinery. Beyond that and the trees and a few squat buildings spread out, there’s not much to see.

“We’re in Modesto, California,” Alice says. “And you’re looking at the future site of the first branch on Earth of the New Library.”

“Oh shit,” Quentin says, and watches for a moment the workers at their tasks. Paying attention now he can catch glimpses of magic running to smooth things along. He feels moved that Alice wanted to show him this; it feels like getting to see a little piece of her heart. “Uh. Congratulations?”

“It’s been — a lot of work, and a lot of arguing, and a lot of compromise, and a lot of research to really get things going,” Alice says, a note of muted pride in her voice. “And obviously there’s a lot to be done before it’s open, but — I’m pretty excited. There’s something about — when it starts getting physical, you know? Like all that we’ve been working on, opening magic and knowledge up to anyone who needs it, it’s not just this crazy dream anymore. It feels real.”

Quentin thinks of the little piece of ceramic, still sitting on his desk — so much smaller than this, meaning so much less, but still a promise he could touch. “Yeah. I get that.”

They walk to a deli while Alice catches him up on the current thinking around access and staffing and circulation and materials, in Modesto and beyond. Quentin has a hunch some of what she’s saying is stuff she’s told him before, and he feels kind of bad for making her repeat herself on anything she might have shared ages ago, and more than kind of bad for the months he was with her but barely there, failing to be the person he owed it to her to be. The guilt dissipates, though, as they keep talking, walking with their sandwiches to a bench Alice leads them to, facing what Quentin guesses is technically a park but consists entirely of a grassy rectangle surrounded by pavement. It’s reassuring, that they can talk like this after everything that’s passed, that she still wants to. Like every moment he gets to spend as Alice’s friend overwrites a little more of all the things he’d failed to be. 

“So why Modesto?” Quentin asks, looking around: the yellowed grass, the low-slung off-white buildings with their peeling paint. “Was it the… ambience?”

Alice's makes a funny smile, proud and pleased. “There were a lot of reasons behind the final decision. Some logistical, some political — the old Library had some intense tension with the hedge community in the area, and we’re hoping setting up shop here can be kind of an olive branch, to show them we’re really serious about change. But I’ll confess — for me there were sentimental reasons, too, for pushing for this location.”

Quentin smiles a little. “I thought you weren’t sentimental.”

“Everyone’s sentimental,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Just — some a lot less than most people.” Quentin laughs. He likes her so much. “What about you? How’s your mending spell going?”

“Oh, it’s — it’s going, I guess. Ups and downs.” He tells her about the plate that worked, and the coffee maker that didn’t quite, and the edits he’s hoping will bring it to completion. “You were right, by the way,” he says, a little begrudgingly. “Calling Josh was a good idea — he got it unstuck. I never would have thought to try like — the equivalent of watering it, basically. Which I guess is why I suck at gardening.”

Alice laughs. It feels good to know he can still do that. “You know, if you manage to complete it successfully, you should write it up and submit it somewhere. It’s a really neat idea.”

“Yeah, maybe.” That’s so nice of her to say he feels bad pointing out that it’s hard to imagine anyone interested in a write-up of how to fix a single kitchen appliance if you fucked up your magic by being a dumbass.

“What else have you been up to?”

“I mean, nothing like the Library,” Quentin says. “I don’t know. I’m trying to quit smoking for, like, the ninetieth time.” Alice raises her eyebrows in a _good for you_ motion. “I joined a book club. I go to yoga, sometimes.”

“ _You_? Go to yoga,” Alice repeats.

“Is that so hard to believe?” Alice just looks at him, and he laughs. “Yeah, I hate every fucking second of it. But — it’s good to have a schedule, or whatever. And I do think it’s been helping with — oh, this you’ll like —” He tunes into the magic for one of the light spells he picked up at the spellshare, a little turquoise orb at the tip of his finger, and Alice’s eyes go wide and eager.

“Wait, how’d you do that?” she asks. “I don’t know that one, and it’s — it’s not —”

“Yeah,” he says, glad to have something he feels like he can give her, “so this friend of mine says —” And he tries to sum up the bits and pieces he’s picked up about this strain of vernacular magic.

“That’s fascinating,” Alice says when he’s done. “I don’t think I’ve come across anything like that in my research — I’ll have to look for it when I get back, but —”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Quentin says. “I get the sense there’s a lot that hasn’t been written down.”

Alice nods, taking this in. “So — that all seems good, though. You’re, like. Doing things.” The _like standing up_ is silent and palpable, but she says this encouragingly. It’s weird and sweet.

“Yeah,” he agrees. He feels like he should be embarrassed, but — it’s Alice. What is there left to wish she didn’t know? “I’m — trying to, anyway.”

“Margo showed me your map,” Alice says.

“She did?” A kind of pleased prickle travels down his neck. He wouldn’t have expected that.

“Yeah,” says Alice. “Oh, that reminds me — you should come back up here once it’s open. I think we’re going to kick off programming with a really cool exhibit — maps of magic from all over, some centuries old. Margo thinks she might be able to loan us something from Fillory, depending on how she’s doing with her bridging proposal — I don’t know if you’ve heard, she wants to kind of start normalizing it here, laying the groundwork to maybe open up travel a little more between the realms. Anyway. She said this could be good PR, basically. And Benedict down in the Underworld branch has a couple rarities he’s pretty sure he can get approval to loan out temporarily, although the preservation spells on those will probably be a pain.”

“Benedict?” Quentin asks, his stomach twisting darkly. “Like, Fillory Benedict?”

“Yeah,” Alice says, “he’s head of the Cartographical Division down there.”

“Is he —” It’s taking more than the usual effort to breathe normally. “Like, do you — do you talk to him, does he seem —”

Alice makes an irritated little _tch_ sound. “Underworld visitation permissions are one of the things we’re still negotiating — he calls into meetings, though. We’ve got a Heinemann’s Half-Portal set up for it.” She peers at Quentin behind her glasses. “Hey, Q, are you okay?”

Quentin is — okay, he’s okay, he’s fine, he — god he fucking wants a cigarette, he’s —

— remembering: the dark of the sky, the roll of the waves. The wooden beams of the ship and standing on the deck his dark reflection, reminding him of who he was. Over and over, while he rested bound with ropes to the mast. Over and over until he didn’t, because —

— _I failed_.

“Q. Quentin.”

Alice is talking to him. He shakes his head, trying to clear; breathes in, thinking absurdly of Alana, and almost out of habit reaches out to feel — the magic, near him, around him. Like always. Constantly moving, and as it ever was.

It — helps. Grounds him, or whatever. “Yeah. Yeah, sorry, I —” He clears his throat. “It’s just, thinking about when he…”

Alice looks stricken. “I’m so sorry — I should’ve thought —”

“It’s okay,” he says, waving off her apology, “it’s — not your fault, just.” He takes a few breaths, trying to figure out what he wants to say to her. Listening to the magic, like somewhere humming beneath it he'll hear himself. “I — do you think you could — the next time you talk to him, maybe, just — just let him know that I’m — I’m really fucking sorry?”

“I… could,” Alice says slowly, furrowing her brows. “But — sorry for what, Q?”

“I mean I —” He lets out a laugh that’s more bitter than he’d like. “I, uh. You know. As good as killed him, pretty much.”

“Q, I don’t —”

“No, Alice, it’s — it’s okay, you don’t have to make me feel better about this, I’m —” Jesus, what is he? His hands are shaking. Maybe this was the wrong time to quit smoking.

“You didn’t kill him,” Alice says gently.

Quentin shakes his head. “I didn’t — push him over, but it’s — it’s my fault he died. If I had just been able to — fucking _deal_ , or if I had stopped to think — like, I knew he had — stuff going on, we’d _just_ talked about it, and I —” He’d been so focused on his mission and his frailty that he’d overlooked the danger in plain sight.

“You didn’t kill him, Quentin,” Alice says again, more firmly this time. “The key did, if anything. The stupid quest killed him.”

“But I was the one on that boat on the quest,” Quentin insists. “It was my responsibility, and I — fell down on the job.”

Alice shakes her head. “Look, I know the quest meant a lot to you. And I know I wasn’t exactly on board at the time, for — a lot of reasons, some better than others. But — think about it. The quest was the same bullshit we’ve always had to put up with when dealing with gods. Even the ones that mean well are — selfish, and cold, because we’re not real to them. We’re like action figures, or characters in a story. And they can’t learn new stories. Maybe Calypso and Prometheus really thought they set up the quest to protect whoever tried it, but — Jesus Christ, Q, they were working with understandings of humanity that are thousands of years old. I mean, have you read Greek mythology? Those guys were fucked up. I wouldn’t want to be a hero on their terms.”

Quentin — has. Enough to know he can’t argue with that. “So, what,” he says, “we just shouldn’t have tried?”

“I didn’t say that,” Alice says, with the faintest touch of impatience. “And, sure — looking back, who even knows. The price was already high by the time I fucked everything up. But I don’t think trying is bad. I just think — you can’t let it be this thing that defines you. Because it was never about us. Not really. It was about — this story they’d made up, a long time ago. Real life — _human_ life — it’s messier than that. It doesn’t have these predetermined endings.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says roughly, eyes on the thin grass by his feet. She’s probably right, he knows. And not just because she’s smarter than he is. The quest had been someone else’s story, neat and tidy and not quite human. That’s why he’d been so eager to step into it — to wear the narrative like a costume that would make him what he needed to be.

God — why does he fall for that, every time?

Softly Alice says, “How’s that forgiveness coming?”

Quentin tries for a half-smile that feels more like a grimace. “Work in progress, I guess.”

On the other side of the not-quite-park a woman walks her dog, a big shaggy thing with drooping eyes. “That’s the other thing about stories,” Alice says. “No one has to live with what happened in them after the end. You close the book and it’s just gone.”

Quentin nods. “Unless someone opens it again.” Thinking: he had closed the book. It just hadn’t stayed closed.

Alice kind of laughs, even though it’s not really funny. “It’s pretty infuriating, when that happens, right? You thought you were home free, and then —”

“I feel like I should apologize,” Quentin says. “For bringing you back. Now that I know what coming back to life is actually like. ”

“Are you sorry?” she asks shrewdly.

Quentin thinks about it; shakes his head. “No.” He never could be, for that. Even if he should. 

“Me neither,” Alice says. “Not anymore. It sucked for so long, but —” She spreads her palms, gazing at the world around her. “Now I have this.”

Quentin takes in the run-down buildings, the dirty sidewalk, the shitty little rectangle of grass. “Modesto, California.”

“Yep,” Alice says with a brisk nod. She opens up a bag of jelly beans, looking — happy. Happy about Modesto, California, and everything she’s building here. It finally clicks, what's different about her — she's wearing pants. “I’ll tell Benedict what you said, when I see him. But — I don’t think he blames you, Q. And honestly he seems like he’s doing — pretty well for himself, down there.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says. He peels back the wax paper to take another bite of his sandwich, thinking that he’s sorry anyway, sorry like a bullet through the skin — so sorry for so many things, but not sorry either he’s alive.

*

“We tried to keep the invite list down for this first one, but you know how things travel around here,” Julia says on the phone. She’s telling him about the spellshare they’re planning in New York soon. “I’m just hoping everyone fits in the penthouse. And sticks to the good vibes only rule. I really want people to see that hedges and classical magicians can hang without the fucking drama.”

“I’m sure it’ll be great,” Quentin says. “And if there’s any issues, that’s what Kady’s for, right?”

Julia laughs. “Yeah, she’s been putting a little of the old fear of god into some of the feistier hedges we know.”

“Ours was a lot of fun. I think Luisa wants to do another one in a few weeks.” Remembering his conversation with Alice, Quentin asks, “Hey — were you ever able to find any articles on vernacular magic?”

“Ugh,” Julia says. “Sort of? But not really. I managed to track down some mentions of what sounds like what you’ve been talking about — non-institutional usage practiced and passed around through local communities. But it’s all, like, mago-anthropological shit, these field researchers traveling to quote-unquote exotic locales and writing up what they see as condescendingly as possible. They call it shit like ‘native magic,’ ‘illiterate magic,’ ‘savage magic’ — even in places like, I read this write-up from like the thirties that was looking at this mining town in Appalachia where the guy was like, _while the practitioners appear white, their rudimentary castings bear more of a resemblance to the efforts of the Haitians described by Lautner than to anything the educated classes would recognize as magic_. Only he didn’t say Haitians, if you catch my drift.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah, it’s bad. And none of it shows any interest in how the magic that’s being done actually works — there’s a lot of assumptions that these people are basically acting out superstitions and getting lucky, but no one’s theorizing how it is that it's actually functioning, or thinking there might be anything to learn about magic itself. It’s so dismissive, it’s like they don’t even see it as real magic. And even in recent publications, I’ve found maybe a handful of critiques of this body of scholarship. It’s practically a non-issue in academia. So frustrating.”

“Wow,” Quentin says. “Well — I guess that’s informative, in its own depressing way.”

“Unfortunately,” Julia agrees. “How’s your magic going? Where are things with the coffee maker?”

“Kind of on hold till the next full moon,” Quentin says. “I mean, I’m tending to it — and talking to it, which feels fucking stupid but Josh seems convinced it can make a difference — but I won’t really know if I’ve gotten any closer till I dig it out.”

“Are you taking notes?” Julia says. “You could use this time to start drafting, if you’re looking to publish.”

Quentin feels his eyebrows knit together incredulously. “I appreciate the support, Julia, but I don’t think a mended coffee maker really ranks on the level people are looking for anywhere beyond a blog post.”

“I’m not just saying that, Q,” she says. “Seriously, people write up case studies all the time. It’s one spell, but it’s a pretty novel application of magic. I bet there are journals that would be interested."

It is sweet, how much she believes in him, even if it’s not always realistic. He’s a dropout not affiliated with any institution; it’s not an eye-catching C. V. “Yeah, well,” he says to move the conversation forward, “maybe I’ll think about it if I can actually pull it off. In the meantime, I’ve started fussing around with — kind of like a magic Spotify mix, sort of. Thinking about ways to take songs and put them in something that doesn’t usually play music, that kind of thing.”

“Cute.”

“Yeah, if I can get it to work it’s kind of a… gift for a friend,” Quentin says. “But really I’m just trying to — keep busy, you know?” He hesitates before adding, “I think it — it helps me, with — whatever — if there’s something I’m working on. Like it kind of — I don’t know, grounds me, or — helps me focus, or something.” He always feels so fucking awkward even thinking that kind of shit, much less saying it loud, but — after everything, he wants Julia to be able to believe he’s okay.

“See, I told you,” says Julia. He can hear the smile in her voice. “Projects. They’re good to keep around.”

Quentin rolls his eyes, not without affection. “It’s not a _project_.”

“How is it not a project?” Julia demands. “It’s something you’re working on, for as long as it takes to do it. That’s a project.”

“Yeah, but…” Quentin can’t actually come up with any reasons it’s not a project. “I dunno. I’ve always thought of projects as like, a Julia-thing.” Julia-things, in his mind, are things that require, like, gumption and discipline and being a self-starter, as opposed to Quentin-things, which mostly involve lying in bed alone.

“You’re always so hard on yourself,” Julia says, gently chiding. “Projects are an everyone thing. And you’re doing them, whether you want to admit it or not. Welcome to the club.”

Quentin considers this. He still doesn’t quite buy it, but — he doesn’t hate it, either. He has Projects. He has Projects? “Maybe,” he allows. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I’m definitely right,” says Julia, and Quentin grins.

*

Once he’s sorted through the links Nico sent him, discarding the programming forums crowded with arguments about acronyms he’s never heard and pulling out the relevant pages on the digital magic wiki, it’s simple enough to identify a set of steps that will get him what he needs: encoding the data in magic; setting up the object to read it; infusing the object with your encoded data; and establishing control keys for things like volume, play, and stop. Nico was right that individually, there’s a whole set of preexisting spells for any one of those, easy enough to master in isolation — the computer stuff people, god bless them, write incredibly precise instructions — and it’s picking and modifying the ones that will slot neatly together for what Quentin actually wants that will be the real work — tricky, but probably doable.

The process would probably go faster if he had more of a background in digital magic applications _or_ in music, for which even as ones and zeroes it turns out there’s all sorts of weird caveats and/or cool shortcuts, depending on your skill level and what you’re after; it turns out experts suspect there’s a magical component to music itself that’s not yet well understood but tends to interact in counterintuitive ways with castings from the ambient stream. He’s not exactly dying to wade through the theory on either of those fields, though, so trial and error it is; he crowds his whiteboard with plausible combinations, turns up his favorite Wolf Parade album, and dives into checking them off one by one.

This approach does have its drawbacks, as he discovers when it takes him three hours and several posts on a Spellit sub with _very_ snobby members to get the pencil he’s been using as a stand-in to stop playing a tinny music-box version of the first thirty seconds of Up Where We Belong because, like, you have to meet people where they are. (“Lmao did you really cast with the rotational speed for MIDIs? I love n00b posts,” says forum user d1ckmancer69, who does not subscribe to this philosophy.)

Crossing off the combination he’d been trying, as well as making notes next to options that look too close for comfort, Quentin wishes briefly he knew someone he could talk the particulars of this spell through, the way Julia and Alice are always up to talk meta-math or even the way Josh has worked him through the basics principles of gardening like a pseudo-Naturalist. Then he freezes, marker in hand, and has to laugh at himself, because — yeah, there’s someone. Someone with ample fucking experience charming inanimate objects to work all sorts of tasks; someone who undoubtedly would have been able to warn him about the rotational speed of his tuts while encoding a song.

Eliot at the cottage, snapping his fingers so that the tinsel along the windows started glowing like neon and pulsing with the beat of whatever was blaring over the speaker; Eliot at Whitespire, some event after Quentin had woken up half-remembered through his long-running haze, showing off the little wooden dolls carved by some proud local now charmed to sing Mariah Carey songs all night; Eliot in the house in the woods, turning their limited set of kitchen utensils temporarily into the equivalent of one of those baby xylophones so Teddy could amuse himself by banging at the notes while Arielle slept outside and Eliot cooked and Quentin tackled the tower of dirty clothes, half-watching the baby content to make noise.

Eliot would know — maybe not exactly what he needs to do, although Quentin wouldn’t be surprised if he’s done something similar. But he’d be able to help, for sure. This is exactly his kind of shit.

So — okay, whatever, Quentin thinks irritably; so he’s cut off the one person in his life who could actually be useful here. That’s kind of like, karmically appropriate, right? He fucked up, and he’s moving on, and the cost is that he has to muddle through this on his own, with only the denizens of s/magikarp, named for some weird magicoding meme about Pokémon, to help him. That’s — fair, probably. And if it feels — not great, maybe, to contemplate, that’s probably like, half on him for being an asshole and half on Eliot for breaking his stupid heart. He can live with not great.

Only — _You Quentin? Alice’s friend?_ He flashes suddenly to his visit with Alice in Modesto. Seeing the work of her life now; learning that he can still make her laugh. The unexpected ease of being around someone who had known him — really known him, through fire and fucking ice, seen up close and personal the very worst he had to offer — and decided he was still worth keeping around. It had been — nice. To have at all, to discover with Alice.

For the first time he finds himself wondering if that could be him and Eliot some day: sitting on a park bench, side by side; settling into something comfortable and close, because there’s nothing they need to hide; making each other laugh. He’s been so focused on moving past the maelstrom of grief within him, he hasn’t stopped to think about what could be once the skies have cleared. If he and Eliot would spend the rest of their lives cordial and distant, or if maybe in all the things that had been real between them, some small piece had survived that could grow again, if they let it. Quentin tries to picture meeting someone in the future, maybe at some Fillorian function, and introducing himself: _I’m Quentin — Eliot’s friend._

He wonders if he can be Eliot’s friend.

He wonders what the right thing to do is: if he’s supposed to learn to let go completely, or if maybe it’s more mature to try for something that could be good, if they managed it. If he could manage it, to even keep it together hearing Eliot on the phone. Some part of him still feels like the sound of his voice would send cracks through the fragile foundation he’s somehow been able to build from scraps.

Thinking of Eliot charming tiles to hum little ditties because he was bored — it doesn’t hurt, now. Or — it doesn’t hurt much.

Well. Quentin shakes himself a little. He doesn’t have to decide any of this today. Maybe he’ll come back to it after he fixes the coffee maker, once he has something a little more solid that feels like his. In the meantime he’s burned out on spellcraft for the day. It’s nice out, and he’s on day three of week eleven. Twenty-two minutes straight, just like he’s done before. He puts on his sneakers and turns up MGMT and heads out the door.

*

There’s a little blue flower in the garden bed by the afternoon of the full moon. So at least, Quentin thinks with morbid cheer as he tries to tamp down the nerves in his chest, the sound of his voice didn’t make it suicidal. That’s a good sign.

He perches by the spot and digs in, reminding himself that they barely changed anything; it makes sense if there’s still a gap. Optimism shoots through him when his fingers hit something solid and smooth — glass, almost definitely, with a handle made of slick plastic. His heart picks up the pace as he reaches in with both hands and pulls it out — a coffee maker. Pot and filter holder and on-switch and cord and plug and all. Every detail exactly as it should be.

For a second triumph blares in his brain, the thrill of the completed object blanking everything out. But then — he frowns at it, less sure the longer he holds it. It feels — off. The crackling magic of something begging to be whole is gone, but — after a mending it’s replaced with something else. Something softer and surer, that lets you know you’re done; that awakeness, a sense of purpose renewed. Quentin can’t feel any of that, here. It’s — inert, somehow.

Maybe it’s different, doing what he’s done — maybe because it grew from a part that was never whole to start with? Or — there are explanations he can imagine, but none of them feel convincing against the hollow spot where the magic should be.

There’s really only one way to find out. Quentin stands and brings the possible coffee maker inside, rinsing the soil and mineral remnants off in the kitchen sink so he can give it a run.

Luisa comes in while he’s drying it off and immediately catches what he’s doing, eyes wide. “You got it? Congratulations, dude.”

“I’m not sure,” Quentin says. “I — it looks good, definitely, but it feels —” He assembles it the way it should go, giving it a once over with his eyes and with his magic. Maybe now that it’s in the place where it belongs —? Empty, still; with a sinking heart he plugs it in and hits the switch. Nothing happens; he presses his lips together. “See, it’s not —” Just to be sure, he scoops in some grinds and fills the reservoir with water, in case it’s built in some failsafe against improper use and is waiting for the appropriate materials, but — nope. Not that either.

“It’s dead weight,” he says. “It looks good, but — it’s not operational, it can’t actually do what it’s supposed to — I don’t —” Frustrated, he shakes his head, feeling disappointment rise. It’s so close — there was a second where he was so fucking sure —

“Well,” Luisa says diplomatically, “it’s better than the last one, right? So that probably means you’re getting closer."

Quentin thinks, Fuck better — fuck closer — fuck magic, fuck trying, fuck my life, fuck this useless piece of shit — he wants to set it on fire and smoke fucking cigarettes until his lungs turn to ash —

“Yeah,” he says with a sigh. “You’re right.” He takes out his phone to snap a picture and sends it to Josh with a text: _close but no cigar — lmk when you can talk?_ Then he empties the unmended object and carries it up to his room.

*

“So it’s an exact replica,” Josh says when they catch each other on the phone in between an apparently marathon Fillorian pruning session and his mom’s birthday dinner. “But it doesn’t work? Did you take it apart to see if it was hollow?”

“I did,” Quentin says. “It looks legit inside, too.”

“That’s fascinating,” Josh murmurs. “When you write this up, I’d recommend including this stage — it opens a lot of questions.”

Quentin ignores this. “I was thinking it over, and looking back through some of the notes I’d taken on residue theory — I mean, I didn’t test it, but that was the other weird thing. It didn’t — _feel_ whole. Mended objects, I can kind of — I don’t know, there’s a vibe, to their magic. It’s the same potency as before they get fixed, but — different. But this was like the magic just evaporated. So — I was wondering if maybe it had — escaped, somehow — like I didn’t give it enough reason to stick around.” Briefly he wishes for a cigarette. Instead he digs through his drawer for some gum.

“Like it evaporated,” Josh says. “So — what do you think of this: setting up some kind of — magic terrarium. Kind of like you’ve already done, to capture the residue, but — strengthening that aspect a little more. Maybe with something like — I don’t know, for plants there’s a bunch of spells that kind of — it’s a weird way to say it, but it’s like they make the plant more aware of itself. You might use one if you’re trying to optimize for nutrition, for example, or for color — almost like it gives it a mirror that triggers a feedback loop. They’re pretty biologically specific though — off the top of my head I’m not sure what would work for a small object. Maybe a Beaumont Net?”

“What about a Taniyama Pool?” Quentin says. “Energy work, it kind of — reflects and reveals — seems like something along the lines of what you’re saying.”

“Oh!” says Josh. “Yeah, maybe — I’ve heard they have a lot of flexibility in application, although I’m definitely not an expert.”

“I know someone who kind of is,” Quentin says. “So — you think that might be enough?”

“Maybe,” Josh says, uncharacteristically subdued. “There’s also —”

Quentin waits a beat for him to finish the thought. “Hello?” he says into the silence, wondering if they got cut off.

“Sorry,” says Josh. “I was just — you know, let me think about it a bit more. I think Taniyama’s worth trying, most def. I’ll let you know if anything else comes to me.”

“Sure thing,” Quentin says. Josh sounds — weird, like he’s got something else on his mind. But Josh has never once in the time Quentin’s known him bothered to hide whatever came into his head, so. Maybe he’s just stressed about the birthday dinner. “Thanks.”

*

“And then between the alpha and beta sequences, like, there _are_ differences as you scale up, but I think for the area you’re looking to cover it’s whatever your preference is,” says Rishi, winding down his explanation of the adaptations Quentin will need to modify a Taniyama Pool for his purposes. “I’d do a couple dry runs before you go for real, but I think once you get past parsing the set-up sequence, you’ll find it’s pretty familiar from what you were doing with me.”

“Sounds good,” says Quentin. “Thanks again for talking me through it — I read the pieces you sent me, but it’s kind of clicking, hearing it all in order like that.”

“Hey, I owe you my career, man,” Rishi says. “No problem whatsoever. Plus, I’m totally into this shit you’re writing, it’s such a cool concept. Where are you thinking of submitting?”

“Submitting what?” Quentin asks.

Rishi lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Are you kidding me? You’re working on this totally high-level application of theory and practice and you haven’t even thought about publication?”

“Are _you_ kidding?” Quentin says. “It’s a mending spell, and I’m not a grad student anywhere. I never even finished my master’s.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Rishi says. “I mean, yes, there are journals that won’t look at you, but — there’s been a big push in recent years to open the institutions of academic discourse to people outside the usual channels. A lot of places have started taking blind submissions, strictly merit-based.”

“And you really think they’d be interested?” Quentin really thought Julia and Alice were just being nice, and Josh was just easily impressed. But if someone actually working in this space thinks so —

“I know people who’d kill for what you have in this,” says Rishi. “Clear, new, easy to explain but theoretically interesting — honestly, give me a couple days to get through this grading and I’ll pull together a list of places I think you could look into.”

“Really?” Quentin says, touched.

“Yeah, absolutely,” says Rishi. “I’ll send you my Edinburgh Style Guide login, too, they have an auto-format page for works cited. Some places are real sticklers about that shit.”

“Why can’t they just use MLA?” Quentin complains.

“God, I’d give a kidney for in-text citations,” Rishi says wistfully. “Speaking of, I gotta get back to red-penning the shit out of these footnote italics. Let me know how it goes casting, yeah?”

“I will,” Quentin says, a strange nervous excitement flickering behind his ribs.

*

They host another spellshare at the start of April. For this one Luisa’s ready to think a little bigger; Quentin rides his bike around the city putting up fliers wherever he’s able that Cynthia designed to read like band advertisements until you cast a revelation. They draw a solid crowd, enough that Quentin hops into the car with Ray to do a last-minute food run partly to keep things feeling festive and partly because the day’s theme is cooking spells. Unlike light spells, which form a significant part of the introductory sequence for Brakebills first-years, Quentin has almost no background with those. Eliot has a whole set of favorites — historically these were skewed towards spells relevant to food that can be served on trays, but over the years in the house in the woods he’d developed a set of modifications he used regularly. He’d tried to teach Quentin some of these, but Quentin had always been too indifferent about food to find them worth mastering.

It comes on him suddenly, as he’s watching someone he doesn’t know demonstrate a spell for determining the doneness of roast chicken without opening the oven — Eliot making stew, Eliot preparing meat, Eliot cutting a loaf into slices of perfectly identical thickness and using magic to soften the crusts for Teddy because of his missing teeth. The little house filling with the smell of onion and garlic, or the yeasty scent of freshly baked bread. Images lovely and gone and fading now, like old photographs: they don’t feel like loss anymore. They just feel like the past.

Eliot would love this, Quentin thinks, marveling at how it doesn’t hurt. It almost makes him smile, how easily he can picture Eliot’s delight.

The other difference from the first spellshare is that people brought light spells with a roughly even mix of tutting and other techniques, but nearly every spell someone has for working in the kitchen comes from outside the institutional tradition. Quentin has the sense that if he hadn’t started wrapping his head around the vernacular style he’d be totally lost. As it is, he’s worse at this than most people here, slower and clumsier and lacking finesse, but the atmosphere is so encouraging he doesn’t really mind. The concentration of casting, or of people who’ve already built that kind of relationship to the magic, or of spells working with such a similar strand — _something_ about the room has the ambient buzzing, heightened and bright, knocking at the speakeasy door Quentin’s managed to build for reaching into the magic this way until somewhere in the last hour of the event — it’s like it bursts open. Like some barrier disappears and the magic he needs is there to touch, as simple and enticing as the walls of a candy store to an unsupervised little kid. He picks up a miniature cupcake and pictures the spell Ray showed off for switching the flavor of the frosting and he doesn’t even have to think: he holds what he’s looking for and twines it to the magic and listens for what he needs to do and when he bites in the chocolate frosting tastes like vanilla, not too sweet. Ebullient with his success he thinks again — Eliot would love this. And then —

— Maybe one day I’ll tell him about it.

“That was more intense than I expected an afternoon of cooking spells to be,” Quentin tells Luisa while they’re cleaning up after the others have gone.

“It was cool, right?” she says. “I learned some good ones.”

Quentin stacks a set of disposable cups together. “These are the commercially compostable ones, right?” Luisa looks up and gives a thumbs-up. “I feel like last time there was a mix, but hardly anyone was tutting today.”

“Seriously,” Cynthia says, packing leftovers no one wanted to take home into containers. Quentin remembers that she’s the only other classically trained magician in the house. “I could barely keep up.” She opens the fridge and starts slotting Tupperwares onto the shelves. “Although — maybe this was just wishful thinking, but it felt like it was getting easier by the end. Almost like the ambient was — I don’t know, bigger, like a large-print book for when kids are learning to read.”

“No, I felt that too,” Quentin says, intrigued. “Or — like it was closer, or louder —”

“Yes,” Cynthia agrees. “That’s what I felt.”

“Something about — I mean, all that magic happening in closer quarters, all the collaboration people were doing to learn it, I felt that last time, too,” Quentin says; the women nod in agreement,. “But there was something unique about — the way people were doing it. Or most of it. Almost all of it, really — I wonder why that is.”

Luisa quirks a smile. “Okay, I feel like you can get this one. Who does the classical tradition come from? Who had time to write magic down, and devote themselves to finding ways to systematize it so that it could be transmitted through texts or in schools? What did the rest of their lives look like? Take a minute. I believe in you.”

Quentin thinks about his mental images of the magical scholars putting down texts of beginner sequences, writing each other letters with the results of their experiments that became the spine of the magic he learned at Brakebills. “Not people who ever did their own cooking,” he realizes.

“Exactly,” she says. “Robert Anbinder didn’t have to worry about making dinner any more than Isaac Newton did. I mean, these days you can look online and find a ton of tuts you can use in the kitchen. But historically that was never an area prioritized by people who had access to institutional magic. They didn’t have a need for it. So yeah, most people who do both — their cooking stuff tends to come from elsewhere.”

Quentin turns this over in his mind. Remembering his conversation with Julia about the patchy research on vernacular magic, something sparks for him — that sense that there’s a connection there, if he can just find it. “I was talking to Julia about the way academics had written about other kinds of magic, when they bothered,” he says, not sure where he’s taking this, “and she was saying how — researchers had this like, totally dismissive view, almost like — almost like they didn’t think of it as real magic, even when they saw it happening.”

Luisa rolls her eyes. “Figures.” Cynthia hums in assent.

“Right, but — what if that was literally — not _true_ , it’s obviously _un_ true and condescending and like, um, you know, racist and classist and — other -ists I’m probably forgetting — but —” He’s moving his hands through the air like he can tut the idea into coherence, if he just — it’s almost there, coalescing into something real — “but what if, what if there was a literal aspect to — to how they defined magic, or identified it, or — look, the schools, they identify candidates for admissions by doing these screeners, right? Brakebills has these globes, I don’t know if other places have their own shit — but those were all built, the spellwork was all developed, by people from the classical tradition, right? So —”

“Oh, shit.” Luisa’s eyes sparkle as she catches what he’s trying to put out. “What if they only pick up on certain types of magic?”

“Exactly,” says Quentin, relieved she’s managed to put it to words. “So what if — I mean what you’re starting here, what Julia and Kady are doing in New York, people are talking about access like it’s just about getting magic to the people who can do it. But what if —”

“What if that’s more people than we even know,” Luisa finishes. She meets his eyes and the two of them give mirrored little laughs of excitement.

“We need to test this,” Quentin says. “To do some magic that’s not — it can’t be that it’s _just_ about classical magic, or else it never would have picked me up, but — magic that’s not as heavy on the user side, maybe. That — you know, that really active magic, that’s operating unilaterally on the ambient — we’d cast in a way that lets the magic itself do more, or —” He shakes his head. It’s so hard to talk about something he doesn’t have a vocabulary for. “Run some shit like that, see if it gets picked up.”

“By what?” Cynthia says, frowning. “I can set a pretty low spell-retrieval threshold, but as far as I know any purely passive receptor is going to need some pretty heavy duty machinery. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something like that outside of the schools.”

“Let me make some calls,” says Quentin, a smile tugging at his mouth. “I’d guess it could take a while on their end, but — I might have an in.”

*

Quentin gets Julia’s voice mail before he remembers that she mentioned heading over to Fillory for a while to consult on establishing taxation structures and market norms as the only person any of them know who’s ever taken an Econ class. It’s not urgent, but he’s enjoying having something to chase, so he shoots Kady a quick text asking her to call him when he has a chance, figuring she’s probably aligned enough with Julia that she might be able to answer his question.

She calls him back in a few minutes, which is way faster than he expected because, like, he didn’t think he was that high up on Kady’s priority list. Maybe it’s a slow day in New York.

“Hey,” she says when he answers the phone. “How are you doing?”

“Uh, fine,” Quentin says. Her voice is a shade softer than usual, serious in a way he doesn’t really associate with her, except when — oh, shit. “Oh I’m not — like, I’m doing pretty well, with — you know, all that,” he clarifies hastily, feeling his face turning red with embarrassment. “Yeah, that’s not — it’s all good, um. I’m — I’m actually not here to talk about me.”

“Wow, congratulations,” Kady says, deadpan but almost like she kind of means it. “This is a big day for you.”

Harsh, but honestly? “Yeah I’ve — earned that, probably,” he acknowledges. “But so — actually I was wondering — are you in contact with Fogg at all, through the stuff Julia is doing with him? Like if you asked a favor, or something...”

“I’m not exactly his favorite person,” Kady says, sounding amused. “But Julia pretty much is, so. He’s had to acclimate to having me around.”

“Okay,” Quentin says. “Because I was thinking — Julia and I have been talking about like, ways that doing magic that exist outside of the traditional system, right, and I was wondering — the screeners the schools use, like the globes that Brakebills has, they pick up magic, I think even latent magic, but — if different styles of magic operate on the ambient in different ways —”

“They could be missing a lot of shit,” Kady finishes, catching on immediately. “I get it. So you want to, what, borrow one to investigate?”

“Yeah, basically,” Quentin says. “Or — even if we could find out what it takes to build something like that, or who to talk to that knows how, that would be a start. Because — I mean, if the goal is to spread access as wide as possible, and there are people who have potential but will never make it onto someone’s radar —”

“The door could open even wider than we’ve been thinking,” Kady says. Quentin feels a prickle of excitement along his neck. “That’s my goal, for sure — I didn’t really realize it was yours.”

Quentin brushes his hair back, uncertain. “I don’t know that — I mean I’m not, like, in it the way you and Julia are. But — I dunno, obviously I support the movement, or whatever.” He thinks about the day he learned he could do magic — all the people who might be able to feel the way he felt then, if someone just knew how to find them…

“Yeah,” Kady says. “I’ll connect with Fogg, see if he’ll give us anything. Might have to wait till Julia gets back to sweet-talk him. I can ask around the local hedge network, too — I know Marina used to keep an ear out for potential members, not sure if she was eavesdropping on the schools or if she had her own shit. Shit, I might have to talk to fucking Pete.” She makes a disgusted sound.

“Sorry about that,” Quentin says. “But — thanks for looking in.”

“No problem. It’s a good idea.” Quentin doesn’t think Kady’s ever given him a compliment before. Maybe this _is_ a big day for him. “I liked the book, by the way,” she adds, shifting registers.

“Oh,” Quentin says, feeling suddenly awkward. “I’m glad.”

“It was funny,” she goes on. “By the end of it I was half ready to punch the keyboard player myself.”

“I know, right?” Quentin fidgets with the hem of his shirt.

“I should get going,” Kady says. “But — I appreciate the tip. I’ll keep you updated with whatever I find. Thanks for calling. And, Quentin —” She hesitates. “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, hoping he means it. “Yeah, I’ll — I’ll try.”

*

He’s making progress on the song storage spell; he’s pretty much worked out a solid chain for getting songs into an object, although it’s subject to revision once he figures out what he wants to use for the finished piece since it seems the most efficient combination is somewhat material-dependent. Now he’s started futzing around with the playback controls, trying to figure out if there’s a way he can set up voice-control functions that don’t require a particular spell to unlock since he’s not sure how he would need to program for selkie magic. The problem sends him down a rabbit hole of incantation theory, pestering Rishi for MSTOR access to read through articles on the meta-math of magic words; it’s a broad enough topic that Quentin winds up making his first book club nomination, leading to a spirited night trying out energy spells in different languages.

The thrilling clarity he felt towards the end of the spellshare had seemed at the time like a temporary thing brought on by the closeness and intensity of the magic at hand, but it seems to have lingering aftereffects in how easily he can listen into the magic and pull it out for something he’s trying to do. It almost reminds him of the way someone coming home from time spent abroad might slip in the language they’d been using, but remain more fluent than before. Some barrier between him and the magic is thinner now, and working out new spells happens more quickly, with less friction. He starts cooking things more elaborate than sandwiches or toast as a way to play around with magic; there’s something about the interconnectedness of kitchen spells that offers up a framework to experiment on his own, like he’s developing enough understanding to be able to keep learning without always being taught.

He gives himself blisters switching back and forth between a G-chord and a D-chord according to the diagrams he’s found online, and Ray mixes him up a cooling poultice for it. He wraps up the running program week twelve, twenty-five minutes in the middle of which, sometimes, he sort of understands what the form videos are talking about when they say to think of your legs like springs until exhaustion overtakes his muscles and they start feeling again like lead, and starts a new program promising to get him to 5k, which is apparently the same as three miles, because runners have some weird thing for the metric system. He drizzles some olive oil in a frying pan and listens to the magic, to the potential right behind the mix of chemistry and heat, and he quirks his wrist to raise the temperature quickly, and sautés sliced zucchini he’s coated with his casting to steer his hands, if he’s paying attention well enough, so that he’ll stir exactly how he needs to in order to get them perfectly even on both sides, and he doesn’t quite make it the first time but just fumbling with the possibility he thinks _Eliot would love this_ and it doesn’t hurt; he thinks he kind of wishes Eliot could see him, just to laugh at how intently he’s working on this pasta recipe rated on some site as one out of five stars for difficulty; he thinks, _I’m going to fix the coffee maker and then, maybe_ — He runs down Riviera, spring breeze on his face and Modest Mouse in his ears raucous and buoyant singing _we’ll all float on okay — we’ll all float on alright_ — and he thinks in time with his feet hitting the pavement, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe I will. Maybe I am.

*

Josh winds up calling him back the day before the new moon, and he’s once again weirdly uncertain when he does.

“So,” he says, hesitating, “I was thinking more about your spell, and — so far as we can tell, there’s nothing wrong with the last iteration materially, right?”

“Right,” says Quentin. “Although — I don’t actually know much about coffee makers. For all I know there was a wire in the cord made out of the wrong metal, or something.” Wires are metal, right?

“Maybe,” Josh says, sounding doubtful. “But — if it were another plate, or a paperweight, or something, we’d say it was fixed, as it was. The reason we can’t, for a coffee maker, is — it’s not physical. Maybe. It’s — it’s about its purpose, right? It’s not fixed because it can’t make coffee?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” Quentin says. He wonders what this is about.

“I — okay, so, what I’m thinking of — it’s not in any of the classic texts, alright?” says Josh. “Worm castings, daily tending, dragon’s spit, verbal support — that’s all stuff I’ve read about, or learned at Brakebills, or learned from someone else — maybe not the exact combos, but when I’m messing around with energetic fertilization or hydration options, there’s trial and error but it’s all building on classic Naturalist theory. This is… different. It’s — it’s something I started doing — almost by accident, really. I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I was really working at Whitespire full time — it’s something my practice kind of evolved into.”

“Okay,” says Quentin, curious now in spite of himself. Maybe Josh is worried Quentin’s lack of a green thumb will make whatever advice this is impossible.

“And it’s not,” Josh goes on, “it’s — I feel kind of weird about it because I haven’t been able to find it, anywhere. And I’ve looked, through like, _all_ the journals — I’ve talked about it with friends from school a couple of times, and I got the sense that some of them have kind of done it, too, but — it’s not official, or anything.”

“Well, what is it?”

“It’s like — it’s kind of hard to describe,” Josh says. “You know how — you can feel changes in magic, right? The way we all felt it, when it was turned off. It’s sort of like — have you ever tried to do that, like, on purpose? Almost like you’re — I don’t know, smelling for the magic, or —”

“Listening for it,” Quentin supplies, feeling something click. “Kind of — tuning in, and seeing what’s there.”

“Yeah, like that,” says Josh, relieved. “So this is like — plants have their own magic, and I think you said broken objects do too, right?” Quentin makes a noise of agreement. “It’s like — you can set up your seed beds till your fingers are numb, but sometimes I’ve found it helpful to — listen for that signature, or whatever you want to call it. And then when I’ve got it — it’s not exactly like casting. Or — maybe it’s like casting? I don’t really know how to talk about it. Maybe that’s why it’s not in any of the books. It’s —”

“Like if a spell is an instruction,” Quentin offers, “this is more like — an invitation, almost. Something like that?” He feels a soft run of goosebumps up his neck at this unexpected confluence.

“That’s — damn, that’s a great way of describing it,” says Josh, apparently reassured back into his usual cheer. “Have you — done something like this?”

“Kind of,” says Quentin. He can fill him in on that — some other time. Or Josh can ask Julia about it.

“An invitation, yeah,” Josh repeats. “Or — or even like you’re asking it a question, and letting it answer.”

“So,” Quentin says, brain whirring, “so what am I asking it?”

Josh chuckles. “Well, it’s like sex, right?”

Quentin blinks in consternation. “Uh…”

“You’ve got your fundamentals — protection, either magical or prophylactic, lube.”

“Right…”

“And then you’ve got your other tools,” Josh continues. “Your cock rings, your pocket vibes, your magic wands, your strap-ons…”

What the fuck does this have to do with gardening? “Okay.”

“Your free-range dildos, your plugs, your anal beads, your sleeves, your pumps, your heating gel, your blindfolds, your handcuffs, your soft restraints…”

“Uh huh.” Quentin is learning… _way_ more about Josh than he wants to know.

“Your gags, your leather, your whips, your nipple clamps, your thigh harnesses, your body chains, your sex swings…”

Quentin screws up his face, trying to scrub from his brain the mental image of Margo and Josh in a sex swing. “Sure.”

“But none of that _matters_ ,” Josh says, “if you’re missing step one.”

Quentin racks his brain for whatever the fuck Josh Hoberman thinks is step one of sex. “Choose a safeword?”

“ _Ask_ her what she _wants_.” There’s a beat, then he adds, “Or him. My b on the heteronormativity.”

“Right, no, I knew that,” Quentin says, flushing, “obviously, I was just… distracted.”

“So you listen to its magic,” Josh finishes, “and ask it what it wants.”

“I feel like I’m not sure we needed the analogy,” Quentin says, “but — okay. Except — wait, but I _know_ what it wants. It wants — it wants to be fixed. It wants to be whole.”

“Sure,” says Josh. “Plants want to grow. But sometimes they have ideas about how they want to do that, you know? Sometimes they make suggestions about what they need, and sometimes they just — again, it’s like sex: it’s just kind of different, to be asked, right?”

Quentin is — not going to answer that question. “Alright, so — you think when I plant it,” he says, “I — I ask it what it wants, and… maybe it, what, appreciates the gesture enough to get all the way there?”

“Maybe,” Josh says brightly. “Like I said, I don’t really get how this works, even when I’m doing it. But I don’t think it can hurt.”

Quentin considers. It sounds — stupid, but so have several other things Josh has told him that have unfortunately turned out to be helpful. God, he hopes there’s not a lesson in that. “I guess it’s worth a shot.”

*

So at sunset on the evening of the new moon, Quentin gathers his materials and prepares his base and places the piece of plastic he hopes he can make a seed into the soil and covers it up. He sets up the Taniyama Pool first, weaving a small dome-shaped version he learned from an article Rishi sent him, making sure it sinks into its location deeply enough to keep itself going until he’s ready to harvest; then he casts his spell, going through the tuts and the incantation, up until the very last moment when he pauses, so he can listen.

The first thing he notices is that the magic he’s reaching out for is more solid than it’s ever been, his own extraphysical radar for it more sensitive than it was before, as though his experience at the spellshare and all his practice in the kitchen have refined his ability to feel the magic for what it is in the moments he’s not acting on it to make it something else. It’s humming so vividly that for a moment he sits just enjoying its strength. In the depth of its texture he can feel, also, that — this is a surprise — there’s some continuity here, from the last time he cast. The essence of wholeness he’s gathered up into the piece — it’s not a blank slate. It — it feels crazy but he can’t find any other way to think of it — it _remembers_ , somehow, what came before. It remembers him.

Quentin puts that aside, to think on later. For now he puts all of his attention and focus and power into the bright buzzing connection he’s built, and then he asks: “What do you want?”

And then the magic — drops. As suddenly as if there’d been an outage. Like dropping a ball, or cutting a string. Quentin curses; he’ll have to start the spell over, and he doesn’t even know what happened. He got distracted, or — he casts again, bringing himself to that same place of vibrant tension, and asks again: “What do you want?” And —

— the same fucking thing happens, okay, what the hell is going on?

He goes through the motions one more time, and this time when he has the magic at hand, he pauses and tries to think. Remembering what Josh said about being encouraging, he says, “Uh — hi. Hello. It’s, uh — it’s me again.” He waits. Nothing happens. _Obviously_. What did he think —? Rolling his eyes at himself, he keeps going. “So — so I’m trying to ask you a question, and it would be, like, very cool if you didn’t just — freak out on me. Uh. Not that I’m — judging, or whatever.” Although — maybe he kind of is. He’s trying to help, and this piece of shit is just pushing him away? Which, actually, now that he thinks about that —

Empathize, Josh said; and unfortunately, if Quentin’s being honest with himself, this one’s not hard.

“Okay,” he sighs. “So — maybe it’s a little hypocritical of me to call anyone — or, uh, anything — or shit, I don’t know, anyone, whatever, I don’t want to be, like, rude — maybe I’m not the person to accuse others of freaking out. I’m — I’m going to ask you a question, okay? And — you can give me any answer, and it’ll be fine. Or — you don’t even have to answer, if… just — don’t bail on me, okay?” He pauses; tries to press in just a little deeper. He’s not sure, but — he thinks he feels something in the magic — ease. Trying to sound open-minded, he takes a deep breath and says: “What do you want?”

He — oh. That’s — there’s a picture of a coffee maker, fixed and fully functional, suddenly in his mind. That’s good, right? They’re on the same page, he’s on the right track? “Great,” he says aloud. “Okay, yeah, that’s — that’s pretty much what I was thinking, so. Cool.” And now he’s asked, and given it a chance to answer, so he just needs to close this out, and —

— Quentin hesitates. Because the image was — familiar, and easy, but — but it got that, already. And that wasn’t it. So he says, low and careful, “Are you — like, are you sure?”

He doesn’t feel anything, but the magic doesn’t crash, either; that’s something. Josh did say there weren’t always suggestions. Also, he’s talking to a piece of plastic; it’s possible he’s placebo-effecting himself, like people do with Ouija boards. Quentin sits with the magic, unsure about how to proceed. His thoughts drift through time. All those months where what he wanted was to forget that he wanted to die; the moment before, the ugly moment that had felt so good. The way he’d slipped into the ending he wanted; the way it felt like some culmination, some narrative fucking peak. The rightful climax to a story started — who fucking knew when. When he was born, when he discovered magic. When Jane Chatwin hit the first reset button, when Eliot had said no and Quentin had locked his heartbreak in a safe and hid it so well he’d forgotten there had ever been anything he wanted from his life. When he’d almost given himself up at Blackspire only to be pulled back for one final purpose that eventually seemed clear. When he’d opened the book to the quest, and decided that this was the thing he was meant for, and after that he’d looked at his every action, wondering: _Is this it? Is this what I’m meant to be?_

He thinks of Alice at the shitty little park in Modesto, talking about the gods: _We’re not real to them. We’re like action figures, or characters in a story._ She was right. He knew what gods were like; they all did, by then. But he’d ignored what he’d learned because he wanted so badly to fit into a story he could believe in. A story that would tell him: _This is who you are_. Without a story, how was he supposed to know that?

Without a story, he’s not sure he’s ever tried.

Choosing his words carefully, he speaks into the magic of the broken object, which is the magic of potential: “I’ve been trying to get you to be — exactly like you were before. And you came pretty close — maybe as close as you can get.” His throat tightens. “But, um — maybe I’ve been — wrong, or — being the way someone made you before, maybe that didn’t work out for you super well. So, like — what would you want, if — if you just forgot, kind of, about — what you were supposed to be?”

Instantly he gets back — it’s not an answer, exactly. It’s like a warm golden glow, something beautiful and expansive as dawn, threaded through with this spiked EKG line of fear, which — yeah. Yeah, okay. There’s a question mark in it, inquisitive and unsure; and it feels —

“Yeah,” he says finally. “Um, I think — I think you should just — do that one. Even if — I mean I don’t really know what that is, to be honest with you. But it feels — right. So — if you just try it, then — you know, then we’ll find out, and — and maybe it’ll be good. And if not —” He wavers for a second, briefly exhausted at the thought of it. Then he soldiers on. “If not, we’ll just have to — try again. And that’s okay. So — you know, whatever that was for you, like — just give it a shot, and see.”

He holds another moment, feeling something — unsettled and heated, like water just below boiling; then the wingtip-cross, and it’s out of his control.

*

Kady texts him to let him know she was able to score a Brakebills globe and a compass Pete says Marina used to use to identify local potential, and to expect them shortly. Quentin’s not sure why he’s somehow still surprised when Penny blips into sight as he’s tending to his plot with meaningless babble and fresh worm castings (nature: still the worst).

“She said according to Fogg, the globe are meant to work in concert, and he’s a stingy asshole so he’d only give up one,” Penny says, holding the items out, “but he seemed to think it could probably be fucked with enough to work some sense magic solo. Pete has no idea how the compass works — that was all Marina. So — good luck, dude.”

“Thanks,” says Quentin, reaching to take them off his hands. “How are things in New York?”

“The weather’s a lot shittier than this,” says Penny, indicating the clear, sunny day. “But life is alright. No one murdered each other at Julia’s spellshare, so. That was cool.”

“Oh yeah,” Quentin says, “she texted me some pictures — seemed like it went really well.”

Penny nods. “People had fun. It got Kady fully gung-ho for another round, so. We’re trying to pick a good theme.” He gives Quentin a quick once-over. “You doing good?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “I kind of am, actually.” He stands up, brushes the dirt off his hands. There’s an awkward lull where Quentin feels like maybe he should make up some errand to run so that Penny feels okay to leave, or else he should invite Penny to stay for a while to be sociable or whatever which Penny would probably politely decline, like either he should continue on with his mission of learning to stand on his own or he should make himself forge the new path of Being Pleasant Acquaintances With Penny because he’s learning to be better, avoid taking up someone’s time or avoid his own instinct to hide — god sometimes it is so fucking exhausting living in his own head.

What does he want?

He — doesn’t super want to hang out with Penny right now, truth be told. But if he reaches a little further, to some future vision he can barely imagine where it’s him and Julia like always and Penny’s there too and maybe it’s not close but it feels worn in — he might want that. He might strongly prefer that, actually, over a repeat of Julia’s cross-country friends, and newspaper friends, and college friends, and — man, Julia meets a lot of people. Even contemplating it abstractly makes him flinch because it feel so impossible to imagine himself fitting there, but — but he’s not great, actually, at figuring out what’s possible or not, so — maybe he can set that aside.

“Uh, are you busy?” he says, pulse picking up like new-school shyness all over again.

Penny shrugs. “Not really.”

“Do you want to, like —” What the fuck does Penny Adiyodi do for fun? “Chill for a while? Maybe watch a movie or something?” No one just like, doesn’t like movies, right? At least they’d have an excuse not to talk.

Penny’s eyebrows shoot up, not unkindly. Quentin has the sense they both know exactly why this exchange is happening, and appreciates his willingness to play along. “Yeah, that’s — cool,” Penny says, nodding.

“Great,” Quentin says, hands in his pockets, nodding back.

They wind up settling into the living room to watch some old episodes of _Community_ instead, which is an appealingly fast-paced distraction. Quentin rifles through the kitchen and offers up some spiked seltzer because they’re out of beer and baked tortilla chips with the salsa he’s been using as an excuse to fuck around with vernacular magic. “I can make it spicier, if you want,” he says, because he’s pretty much got the hang of that one now. “Or less spicy,” he adds, although Penny strikes him as a four-peppers-on-the-menu type of guy.

“No this is — it’s good,” Penny says, dipping another chip. So — that’s fine.

Quentin wonders what Julia and Penny talk about, when they hang out. He wonders if Penny actually likes this show or if he’s just being nice, and he takes a moment to appreciate the weirdness of wondering if maybe _Penny_ is deciding to be excessively _nice_ , to _him_. Part of his whole thing about making the most of his second chance, presumably. Although Quentin is kind of surprised he rates even high enough to be like, a spot on the list of post-resurrection obligations, considering that Penny is also — well, actually, Quentin has no fucking clue.

“What have you been doing since you got back?” Quentin asks at the end of an episode. “Besides helping out Kady and Julia.”

Penny shrugs. “It’s mostly that. Them, and whoever else is around. I jump on a lot of the Baba Yaga runs, do some Traveling for the New Library if they’re short-handed.”

Quentin eats a chip considering. “I kinda would’ve thought you’d want to stay away from that.”

Penny gives a tilted smile. “You’d think, right? But it’s usually Alice asking — I’m not gonna turn her down.”

“Favors for friends,” Quentin says.

“Yeah,” says Penny. There’s a beat, and Quentin almost hits play on the next episode. But then Penny says, “I was so pissed off all the time, before. I thought all this shit about — I was fucked, my discipline was a curse, nothing was ever gonna make life suck less. But once I woke up it was like — you know, I never wanted to be some fucking master magician, or make fucking bank, or whatever. All my life, I just wanted someone to go home to. That’s it. And getting that, after I fucked up so many times? Man, everything else is fucking gravy. Turns out I’m pretty easy to please.”

“That’s nice.” Quentin says, because it is. He sips his seltzer; it’s raspberry flavored. He sorta wishes he had a cigarette. “I kind of… don’t think that’s true of me.” He picks at his cuticle. “Like. I don’t think there’s some chill, low-maintenance Quentin Coldwater hiding underneath all my — stuff. Even if you go all the way down.”

Penny laughs. “No, you’re probably genuinely high-maintenance.” He doesn’t say it meanly, though. Quentin tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. “But that kinda figures, right? For Julia’s best friend since what, like, first grade?”

“Kindergarten,” Quentin says automatically. “But Julia’s —” He stops, unsure where he’s taking that thought.

“I _know_ you were not about to tell me to my face that Julia Wicker is easy to please,” Penny says, raising an eyebrow.

Quentin — would not describe Julia that way, true. “I mean — no.” He flashes briefly to the way her lips used to purse when a quiz came back with 97 written at the top.

“That girl is asking life for a _lot_ ,” says Penny. He sounds fond, which Quentin approves.

“It’s different, though,” he says. “The stuff she wants — like, she doesn’t —” What he’s thinking is that when Julia’s dissatisfied, she either fixes something or moves on, instead of, like, hiding in bed until her life is more of a mess than before or imploding so that the whole thing self-destructs. But he doesn’t really feel like going there with Penny.

“What’s different is that she doesn’t waste time fighting with herself about what she wants,” Penny says. “That’s like one of the coolest things about hanging out with her. It’s not about how much you want — trust me, I wanted one thing and it still felt like too much, even when I had it, because I couldn’t even admit that much. Julia wants the fucking moon and the stars too, and she gets it or not, but — she’s not gonna act like wanting things is a crime. She’s not fucking sorry for it.”

“That’s definitely true,” Quentin says, thinking: her college applications binder, spreadsheets for summer internships, _Q, you should apply for this. Why not_? He’s always sort of seen the two of them as an odd couple more than a matched set. He thinks about what she said about projects. He thinks that maybe him and Penny will never be best friends, and maybe he still feels awkward, but this is the longest actual conversation they’ve ever had, and he’s not sorry for asking him to say. He thinks that maybe some of her cross-country friends would have been nice, if he’d ever given himself the chance to find out. If he hadn’t been so sure he knew exactly how that story would go. If he’d wanted to try, more than he’d been afraid.

“Hey,” he says, “you wanna stay for dinner? I think Ray’s making like some kind of chili, it’ll probably be ready in a bit.”

“Sounds good,” Penny says, and Quentin presses play.

*

He’s running and listening to the White Stripes, one of his top five all-time desert island albums, and he’s trying to pretend it doesn’t suck. He’s on the second week of this new program and now he’s measuring his distance in miles, although the plural there is kind of generous since so far the plan hasn’t told him to go further than 1.75. That’s actually less than his twenty-five minutes was getting him, according to the app with the robot lady on his phone, although not as much less as he feels like it should be. He feels like it should be easier than it is, like if he’s jogging for less time he should be able to suck it up and go faster, but every time he tries to put this into practice his body immediately rebels. He feels like he should be faster in general, like he would be if he hadn’t spent his entire life avoiding any physical activity that didn’t involve running for his actual life, and he feels like it should feel better by now. It’s a month since he quit smoking for real, knock fucking wood, and a month is one of the estimates Google turned up for when weeks of shredding his nails with his teeth and grinding his molars into sand would start being worth it through his lung cells activating some kind of repair process. Shouldn’t that be making it easier to fucking breathe? It’s still so hard, it’s all so fucking hard, like how today sucks worse than last time because last night he kept waking up from a nightmare where he was dead and the only person he could talk to was the kid from _The Sixth Sense_ and he kept trying to find Julia but the kid was useless, like, Jesus, you die _one_ fucking time and your unconscious apparently won’t let it fucking go, like he’s never once in his life let something go he was supposed to, or managed to hold on to something that should have been his —

Quentin tries to focus on Jack’s guitar and Meg’s drum, tries to remember: _If you’re gasping for air, you’re moving too fast. You should be going slow enough to have a conversation._ He adjusts his speed, tries to breath into his stomach like the runners of YouTube tell him. Diaphragmatic breathing, or whatever. Just — in, out; slow enough to steady it —

— he’s so sick of going slow; he’s so sick of how long it takes him to do anything, how much of his life he’s fucking wasted not figuring out the shit that everyone else pieced together eons ago, when he looks at how badly he’s fucked his life he feels like he’s at the very beginning of actually being a person and what’s the fucking point if it’s taken this long and it’s going to keep being this slow, how fucking old will he be by the time he gets to the level of baseline adult functionality most human beings can expect, how will he possibly have enough time to make it worth it, he’s basically dead already and biding his time —

Land with your feet beneath you, he tells himself; think of your legs like springs. Feeling the slap of his soles against the pavement through the rubber at the bottom of his shoes. The shock of it going up his shins, his knees bending to catch him, the muscles working in his legs and beneath his damaged lungs breathing, breathing, keep your lungs open, in and out — in and out while your feet go left and right —

— it’s stupid, it’s so fucking stupid, he knows he’s been doing okay but somehow here it all is, fresh as it ever was, this fucking gaping maw of need and despair that just doesn’t get any better and doesn’t hurt any less, that won’t be fucking exorcised no matter how many fucking yoga classes and homemade pasta dishes and new fucking experiences he has, it’s this forever wound at the very center of everything he is and what could be truer about him than the thing that never goes away that he hates and hates and hates and hates —

Slow enough to have a conversation. Don’t slump your shoulders. Engage your fucking core. Air going in and out; in and out. Sweat on his face, legs working. One foot in front of the other. Left, right.

— and it’s always going to be there he’s always going to hear the voice that says give up that says shut up that says disappear that says lie down in the middle of the street it’s not worth it your life is never going to mean anything so stop the fucking charade drag your ass to the nearest gas station where goddamn Californians can judge you for buying cigarettes because guess what some people are just fucked up and it’s a stupid waste of time pretending otherwise you’re embarrassing yourself with how hard you keep trying and it would be easier probably for everyone if you fucking gave it up —

One point five miles, says the robot lady in his phone; a quarter mile left. He’s the worst runner in the world but he can cover a quarter mile in somewhere less than five minutes, and he can do five minutes. He’s done five minutes a million times before. Slow enough to have a conversation. Think of your legs like springs. Straight line from your neck to your hips, same as Alana always says. In and out. Left and right. Volume up on the speakers, music in his blood. Drums pounding, guitar deep and wild snaking through his veins.

_I’m gonna fight ’em all — a seven nation army couldn’t hold me back —_

He keeps going. One foot in front of the other, and then again, and again. Exactly that easy, and exactly that hard. Left and right and left and right, until he’s done.

*

The music player is nearly set. He’s still figuring out the playback controls — volume in particular keeps glitching — but he thinks he’ll get it eventually. Quentin’s taking a break to consider the actual songs he wants to pass on. Up Where We Belong, sure; beyond that, he’s trying to think of what else might channel some of the potentially appealing qualities of Celine Dion in a more palatable way. Maybe some of those eighties icons with the big, belty voices — Cyndi Lauper, what’s-her-name from Heart. Alone is basically a power ballad but good. Total Eclipse of the Heart goes to that melodrama Jim Steinman place but kind of sells it for real. Stevie Nicks — rumored to be a secret hedge witch for like forever but never confirmed — that’s a definite possibility. Joan Jett, maybe. Patti Smith — possibly not the right kind of weird?

The thought hits him before he can stop it — Eliot would be able to help with this part, too. Songs with big feelings and huge choruses? He probably has a Spotify mix with that theme already for when he’s feeling extra dramatic. He’d be able to parse what someone would actually see in that Oscar-bait number, better than Quentin can. And he’d get a kick out of it, too, Quentin can’t help but smile to know — he loves curating things. Anything where he gets to think about _taste_.

Quentin glances at his phone. It’s a Friday morning; the full moon’s still more than a week away. He’d told himself once he fixed the coffee maker, he could revisit this decision; the coffee maker would be the proof, right, that he was ready, that he’d made himself enough of a person beyond the guy who’d walked into death to trust that whatever he decided — and maybe he’s known for a while, what that would be — it wouldn’t be another path to self-destruction in disguise. And — and maybe he should wait for that, still; his feelings are fucked up. He doesn’t make good choices. He’s still catching himself running and hiding and finding new ways to disappear. Maybe he should stick to the plan he set out, the one that said the mended object would show his mended heart, and wait for the full moon, or for the month after if this attempt doesn’t take. But when he thinks about putting this off, he realizes — he doesn’t want that. And he doesn’t know if he’s ready, but — he’s waited long enough now that the parts of him that wanted to keep waiting have all faded away.

Quentin sets an alarm on his phone and settles back into his work; and then at ten minutes to noon, he finds Eliot’s number, untouched since last year, and calls. Because he wants to, and because — he’s not afraid. Whatever happens, he'll be okay.

He does feel a rush of nerves once the phone starts ringing; when Eliot says “Hello?” an anxious heat tangles through him and it takes him a moment to find the words.

“Eliot,” he manages. “Hi. It’s me.”

“Quentin, hi.” Eliot sounds cautious — maybe a little pleased. “It’s good to hear from you. I do have —”

“Therapy, I know,” Quentin says, although technically he didn’t; they haven’t talked since the start of last summer. Eliot’s schedule could have changed. “I kind of wanted to — I don’t know, give myself a time limit, just in case.”

“Oh,” Eliot says. His eyebrows furrowing just slightly; puzzled, trying to be nice. “Okay. Uh. What’s up?”

“I just —” Quentin maybe should have planned this better. He should — apologize, probably, but that’s not — this doesn’t feel like the time. “I want to talk to you. Again. I mean — I mean I want us to talk, I want — I want to be your friend.” He’s not sure he’d really known that until he said it, but once it’s out of his mouth it feels — true. Really true. “If, uh — I mean if you still want to, I know it’s been, like, forever —”

“Yeah, of course.” Eliot’s voice is — happy, soft; Quentin can picture his mouth curling into a smile, just a bit. “Of course — I’ll always want to be your friend, Q.”

Quentin swallows. “Cool.” _Cool?_ He definitely should have planned this better. “So, I mean — I know you have to go, but — you know, if you want to call me —”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. “I actually can’t today — I have to head right back to Fillory after my appointment —”

“Oh,” Quentin says, startled to feel a twinge of disappointment. “Okay.”

“— but, maybe next week?” A hopeful lift.

“Next week,” Quentin agrees, nodding even though he’s alone. “Yeah, I’ll — I’ll be around, so just — call me, when you — can, or want to, or — you know. whatever.”

“I will. Bye, Quentin.”

“Bye,” Quentin says. Eliot hangs up; Quentin listens to his pulse, waits for it to settle.

That went — fine, right? Yeah. Yes. That was — awkward, but it’s been — fuck, just about a year since they last saw each other, which makes it, what, nine months since they talked? Something like that. So — all things considered, that was — pretty okay. Obviously they’re not going to bounce right back into — Quentin doesn’t even know. They’ve been friends and they’ve been exes but they’ve never been both, so — whatever. He’s overthinking it. They’ll figure it out, probably. For now, the important bases have been covered: they talked, Quentin didn’t spontaneously morph into a goblin composed of his worst instincts and say something horrible, and Eliot doesn’t hate him.

It’s a start.

*

In the kitchen while Luisa makes them green smoothies in the blender because she swears up and fucking down a giant-ass bunch of spinach isn’t going to make the smoothie taste like spinach, Quentin works some more at the zucchini pasta recipe he’s been experimenting with. He thinks he might give it a rest after today, even though he has a hunch it’ll take some finagling to figure out how to apply the evenness spell he’s still mastering to anything else, because he’s getting kind of sick of zucchini. Anyway, trying to make it work on some other vegetable will probably be educational, right?

He’s waving his fingers to nudge down the heat when Luisa says curiously, “Did I teach you that one?”

“The heat adjustment?” It’s not really a spell in its own right so much as an extension of the evenness spell — if he listens closely enough it’ll let him know to turn the heat down, and the magic will move accordingly if he just kind of — channels it. “I don’t think so. Actually —” Quentin frowns, thinking. “I’m not sure anyone did — I think I might have seen Ray use it once or twice, so I knew it was possible, and it kind of — evolved?”

Luisa makes an impressed face, eyebrows up and mouth pulled into an upside-down smile. “Nice. You’re really getting the hang of it — I mean there are one-offs, but the kind of spell-networks like this, the ones bundled together, right, a lot of times they’re not discrete. When I’m using kitchen magic, it’s like some of the stuff with my discipline, you know — I’m not really thinking through every step.”

“Yeah — I’m starting to get that,” Quentin says. “Honestly I think the spellshare helped a lot. Not just learning the spells, but —” He shakes his head. “I feel like, plugging my magic in that deeply, while the ambient was moving like this — I don’t know. It’s like something clicked into place.”

“Huh,” Luisa says, looking contemplative as she turns the blender on. When it’s done whirring she says, “I wonder if we can use that, somehow.”

Quentin flips a zucchini slice, trying to keep his focus. “What do you mean?”

“Like —” She opens the cabinet where they keep the cups. “I mean it could be a fluke, or a coincidence, but — if it’s not — if there’s some way to bring people closer to their potential, by doing magic together…” She shakes her head, pouring into a pair of tall glasses. The smoothie is very green. “I don’t know. I can’t quite get there. But — you see where I’m thinking?”

“I think so,” Quentin says. “Speaking of — any luck trying to get the globe to work solo?”

“Not yet,” she says, “but I passed it on to a friend of mine whose discipline is sense magic — hopefully he can crack it. No idea what the fuck is up with that compass, though.”

“Yeah, I think that might be the point,” says Quentin. “I didn’t know Marina, but — I get the sense she kept a lot of secrets. For all we know it’s locked to some passcode.”

Luisa takes a long breath, then shrugs. “Well — I’m meeting Tess for drinks after dinner, so that’s a tomorrow problem. Here.” She holds out his glass.

Quentin takes it, and reluctantly brings it to his lips, but actually — “Okay, you win. It tastes normal.”

“See? Told you,” she says, and grins.

*

He winds up talking about his experiments at the stove with Julia, who for some reason thinks they are extremely cool.

“Luisa was thinking there might be some way to — I don’t know, channel this idea into access work,” he says. “Sort of like what you were saying a while back, about how — magicians need spells, but they need other magicians too, right? If we can figure out ways that adepts can help people develop — I don’t know. I mean, Brakebills is an actual school and they still have you sign a waver saying it’s your fault if you blow yourself up. I feel like they’d have figured out a better way by now, if there was one.”

“I don’t know,” says Julia, “there’s a lot of shit it’s kind of wild to me they haven’t figured out a better way for. I don’t know that pedagogical innovation is really their stock in trade.”

“That’s true,” says Quuentin. He’s entertaining this line of thought because of a way of doing magic he had no idea existed at Brakebills. Magic is bigger than anyone there bothered to tell him — maybe bigger than they know.

“So how are your projects coming?”

There’s a slight tease in her voice, affectionate. “I want you to know,” he says, “I’m rolling my eyes at you.”

Julia laughs. “I figured.”

“I’ll be pulling the coffee maker early next week,” he says. “I had kind of a — feeling, planting it, but — we’ll see. And the music player is pretty close to set, actually — I’m just trying to find a volume adjustment that plays nicely with the rest of the architecture.” He pauses, considering; fidgets with the hem of his shirt. “I called Eliot, last week.”

Julia’s response is carefully neutral. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I — just to say hi, kind of.” That feels — understated, but she can put together the pieces.

“How was that?” she asks gently.

Quentin shrugs, remembers she can’t see. “It was okay, I think. Not — pretty uneventful, which I guess was kind of the goal. Weird, but — not bad, or anything. I think — I don’t know. He was my friend before he was anything else, you know? And that’s been — it turns out I missed that, even after — sort of once the dust had settled, on the other stuff. I think.”

“And things feel settled now?”

Quentin considers his life: slicing zucchini in the kitchen, talking to a coffee maker in the garden. Encoding music into magic, reading up on tips and techniques. Thinking out loud over hummus at book club or over smoothies with Luisa about what magic is and how to get it to the people who deserve to know it’s there. He can play three whole chords now, although not well or fast enough to make a song, and at the end of class the other day he could almost grab his ankles when Alana told them to bend over into a forward fold. Sometime in the future he’s going to talk with Alice about the Modesto branch and with Rishi about list of upcoming submission deadlines he sent and with Kady about whether they manage to figure out the fucking globe and with Penny about like something normal maybe whatever that is and with Josh about whether the coffee maker works and with Margo, maybe, Margo he hopes, about the outages in Fillory and the threat from the Fingerlings and with Eliot about — he doesn’t know yet. But it feels like there’s a future to find out in, and it’s not much of one but it’s his. It’s more than a month since he last had a cigarette, and one of these days he’s going to run three miles.

“Yeah,” he says. “They do.”

“That’s really good, Q,” says Julia, warm.

“It might be.” He finds he doesn’t want to argue. But he does want to hear about what’s going on with her, so he says, “How was Fillory?”

“Oh my god, insane,” she says, and launches into telling him about the schism between the defenders of tradition and those open to modern policies like a unified currency, the politics of market locations especially in the days leading up to a holiday, the unexpected living costs outlined by the representatives of the talking animals, and Quentin listens and laughs and groans and asks questions and feels not for the first time like whatever else is good in his life, it’s possible because he knew her first.

*

Eliot calls him on Friday afternoon about a half hour after the end of his therapy appointment, interrupting Quentin’s very busy schedule of trying to read a collection of short stories Cynthia recommended while pretending he’s not waiting to find out whether he’s been waiting for the phone to ring.

He picks up the phone with, “Eliot, hey. How are you?” He sounds — normal, he thinks. Very normal. He can do this. He can have a normal conversation with his ex.

“I’m good,” says Eliot. “How are you?”

“I’m good, too,” says Quentin.

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Yeah I’m — I’m glad you’re good, too.” What is he doing?

“That’s — good.”

There’s a silence. Quentin kind of expects Eliot to fill it, but he doesn’t; maybe he’s trying to follow Quentin’s lead, since Quentin is the one who completely lost his mind. This is — excruciating, so far, but objectively a huge improvement, so Quentin tries not to panic. He kind of wishes he had a cigarette. He thinks about telling Eliot that he quit smoking, but it feels — too personal, for where they are. He thinks about apologizing, but he can’t — like he really should apologize. Maybe after they’ve had one semi-real conversation. He thinks about making a Han Solo joke — _We’re fine. We’re all fine here now, thank you. How are you?_ — but Eliot wouldn’t get it and then it would just sound like Quentin was asking how he was again, which is — not normal. _Think, Coldwater_ , he tells himself; he casts around for what some hypothetical nice, normal, well-adjusted friend of Eliot’s might say. “How’s, uh, work and things? How’s Fillory?”

“Fillory’s okay,” Eliot says. He sounds relieved, so that’s — good? Quentin will take it. “We’ve got a council on economic policy now, which is kind of neat. Makes us feel like we’re a real country, all grown up. Julia was a big help.”

“Yeah, she mentioned,” says Quentin. This is good. They’re conversing. “What about, uh — I heard about those magic outages you guys were having. Any luck with that?”

“Oh,” says Eliot, surprised — not unpleasantly. “Yeah, actually — well, kind of. After digging through all these fucking like, scrolls crumbling to dust in the archives, and some incredibly weird illustrated manuscripts courtesy of the New Library, Fen and Twenty-Three managed to piece together — so Fillory’s magic, right, it runs on magic, we know that, and we’ve been thinking the Wellspring gives it what it needs to more or less function, on a basic subsistence level. But it turns out that the Wellspring actually gives it — _almost_ what it needs. Like it needs — tune-ups, or supplements, or whatever, to the magic every now and then, or starts — fritzing, as we’ve seen.”

“Like Newtonian mechanics,” Quentin says, then immediately wishes he hadn’t.

“Like what?”

Quentin rolls his eyes at himself. “Isaac Newton — he came up with these universal laws of physics that explained like, how the universe functions, basically. But if you actually follow through like, the math of them, what you get is a universe that should collapse.”

“Oh,” says Eliot, politely. “Like his numbers were off?”

“Not — I mean, I guess kind of, but — his model was basically missing the concept of general relativity,” Quentin says, full of regret. “Which Einstein totally revolutionized the field of physics by figuring out like three hundred years later, so.”

“So Newton did pretty good, considering,” Eliot says. Quentin thinks there’s a smile in his voice.

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “And he also — I mean, he didn’t think of it as an error, or a paradox. He thought it was basically proof of God, if I’m remembering right. Like — the fact that the universe hadn’t collapsed meant God must be stepping in to wind it up like a watch every now and then.”

“Huh,” says Eliot. “That’s actually a pretty good analogy. Our sense is that Ember and Umber basically set Fillory up to — to need magicians. The logic was kind of lost, but we think that might be why they’re so weird about the whole — Children of Earth thing there, since none of the humans born on Fillory can do magic. The Earth-Fillory revolving door — it wasn’t just Ember and Umber entertaining themselves. They designed a world that needed these infusions of magical activity to keep operating. But Martin Chatwin closed the door, and now there are fewer magicians in Fillory than there ever have been, so…”

“Right,” Quentin says. “Huh. What are you guys going to do?”

Eliot sighs. “We’re not sure yet. For now, and probably for a while, things will be — inconvenient, but okay, with our kind of magic skeleton crew patching shit up as needed. Margo and the Council are talking about long-term plans — there must be some magicians on Earth other than us who’d be willing to move there full-time, but it’s a hard sell, especially if the clock is our only way through without a Traveler. They’ve been talking about ideas like — summer apprenticeship programs with some of the schools, that kind of thing, although ideally it would be people in it for at least the medium-term, since there’s definitely a learning curve to dealing with this stuff. So. Pros and cons all around, but. It’s a start.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. There’s a kind of sad bitter jolt through his insides at the realization that if you’d told him years ago the High King of Fillory would be looking for Children of Earth to move there, and he’d have the skills to qualify, he would have jumped on the chance fast enough to leave a trail of cartoon smoke, but now…. He sets that aside. One long-lost dream at a time. “Well, that’s good, that you’ve got — something to work with.”

“Yeah.” There’s another pause. Quentin considers apologizing again. Maybe that’s the last thing he needs to do before they actually can talk like regular people. And he is, like, sorry, right? So — he doesn’t know why he can’t make his mouth do it. Then Eliot says, “Oh! Julia told us you were working on some really cool-sounding mending spell. And, um — I think she mentioned something that sounded kind of like an iPod?”

Quentin blushes a little, embarrassed by Julia’s hype, but he’s grateful for the topic. “Yeah, I — uh, I fucked up my magic,” he euphemizes, talking quickly so Eliot doesn’t have a chance to inquire, “maybe, I don’t know, the whole death thing or whatever — anyway so I’ve been trying to come up with a way to, you know. Fix stuff, if I can’t — do it the usual way. Uh. I’m not quite there yet, but — you know, I’m — chipping at it, or whatever. Josh, actually, has been a big help, so.” Weird but undeniable. “And then — oh actually,” he remembers, “I was kind of hoping to talk to you about this other one, because I thought you might be able to help me with it. I… met… this selkie, right, and we’re like — kind of friendly, I guess.” His ears burn a little. Eliot definitely does not need to know the details of their acquaintance. “Um, so she’s really into human music, but she loves, like — My Heart Will Go On —”

Eliot gives a knowing laugh. Quentin’s stomach flutters appreciatively at the familiar sound. “So let me guess. You want to give her something to introduce her to _real music_ because she’s so _tragically deluded_ about what qualifies as _actual art_.”

“Okay, like, I’m not going to apologize for being a hipster about _Celine Dion_ ,” Quentin says. “Even you have to admit that’s like, bottom of the barrel. Possibly leaking into the actual floor.”

“She’s not my favorite, but she’s not like, a war criminal.” Quentin can practically hear him rolling his eyes. It’s kind of nice.

“Well, if you can help me figure out this volume control issue,” Quentin says, “I’ll let you send me your playlist of songs a selkie who likes dumb power ballads might be into.”

“What makes you think I have such a playlist?”

“I mean, I’m sure you don’t have one _exactly_ for that, but I bet you’re already dying to scroll through the most relevant ones to make it happen, and extra dying for an excuse to make me listen to Girls Out Loud,” Quentin says.

“Girls Aloud.”

“And before you ask,” he goes on, “what makes me think _that_ is that I’ve met you before, like ever?”

“Well — fine. Guilty as charged.” His mouth turning up just barely, against his efforts to hide it. Quentin smiles to himself. “So what’s the issue?”

Quentin talks him through the plan as he’s set it up so far, and as he predicted, Eliot is more than familiar with the strains of magic he’s using, and has ample suggestions both about tweaking the architecture in general to maximize the underwater acoustics and about fitting in the volume control specifically. He's _way_ more helpful than d1ckmancer69. In about fifteen minutes Quentin has a page of notes he’s pretty sure will finish the job, and he feels — good? He thinks he feels good. “Thanks for this.”

“Of course. Happy to help.” Eliot sounds like he means it.

“I should let you go,” Quentin says, because he doesn’t think he can handle another awkward silence.

“Okay,” Eliot says. “Um — it was — it was really great talking to you.”

Quentin takes a breath, in and out. “You, too.” Feeling bold he adds, “Maybe — maybe I’ll talk to you again next week?”

“Definitely,” Eliot says, and Quentin feels — relieved, or warm, or — good. That’s — it’s nice. It’s — it feels weird, yeah, to talk to Eliot and stick to — to things outside them, to Fillory and theory and fucking Isaac Newton, after how they used to — but maybe it’s good that they have those things, for now, while they remember how to be, around each other. It’s like running, maybe — they need to build back up, to — to wherever they’re going. But — probably they’ll find it, Quentin reasons, if they just — keep talking. Like they did the first time, right? Like anyone ever does.

*

Walking home with Luisa from drinks at the bar nearby in honor of her job hiring her back now that it’s spring, Quentin remembers it’s the full moon tonight. “Hey, I’m gonna go check to see if the coffee maker’s sprouted.”

Luisa follows him to the garden bed, where the now-familiar tiny blue flower stands like a flag. Quentin braces himself for disappointment — this is the process, he reminds himself; whatever happens next, it’s data — and starts to dig. He crouches down and sifts through the dirt and the ground-up mix, willing his pulse to please calm down and be reasonable about this, until his hands hit — something, so it’s not a total dud. A curved something, that feels — Quentin frowns. It doesn’t feel like plastic, or like the glass of the pot; it feels — very smooth, like porcelain, maybe? He reaches around and pulls out —

“Huh,” says Luisa, tilting her head. “That’s… interesting.”

It’s a ceramic pot, tall and round and mint-green, with a spout and little leaves painted around the top rim; it looks kind of like a very squat French press, but when Quentin lifts the lid there’s no plunger — just two chambers, divided by white ceramic flowing smoothly from the sides. “Yeah,” he say slowly. There’s no mechanism that he can see for how to make anything placed into it into coffee — no filter, no components to operate, no plug to channel electricity. He should feel disappointed at such a miss, but — there’s something nudging at his instincts —

“Well,” she says comfortingly, “I’m sorry it wasn’t quite there, but at least you got kind of a cute souvenir out of it. We could use it to store granola or something.”

“Uh huh,” says Quentin, reaching in with his magic to feel — he’s almost sure but afraid to hope — “Hold that thought.”

They head inside to the kitchen, where Nico is eating a PBJ by the sink. Quentin sets the — object — on the counter and starts grabbing for some coffee and a measuring spoon.

“Are you making coffee with that?” Nico asks.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” says Quentin. He scoops enough grinds for a few cups into one of the chambers, heart beating fast, and fills the other one with water, figuring he can trial and error his way to the ideal proportions later, if he’s right — and he thinks he’s right, he thinks it’s — he picks up the lid, then changes his mind and digs his phone out of his pocket and holds it out to Luisa. “Can you video this, actually?” She looks quizzical but she takes the phone and holds it at the ready.

Eyeing the proceedings skeptically, Nico says, “How does it work? There’s no cord.”

“That’s because,” Quentin says, picking up the lid again, “if I’m right — and I think I’m right — it doesn’t need electricity.” He jerks his chin at Luisa and she nods at him to continue. Quentin places the lid on the top. “Because I _think_ — it runs… on magic.” There’s a tense moment where nothing happens and Quentin feels, like, preemptively stupid, like the embarrassment is building up behind some dam and in a second it’s going to burst all through him. But then —

“You guys hear that, right?” he says, eyes fixed on the pot. “I’m not hallucinating?”

“I hear it,” Luisa says excitedly. “It sounds like — _something’s_ happening.”

It does — there’s a kind of burbling sound, and a soft rough scraping noise, getting louder as the magic in it — Quentin doesn’t even have to work to track it now — heats up, or grows, or — and then it starts fucking, like, _humming_? A low bass tone, working through a handful of notes in a familiar rhythm Quentin’s too distracted to place — _hmm — hm-MM-mm, hm-mmm — hmmm —_

“Is that the guitar riff from Seven Nation Army?” says Nico.

Quentin bursts into laughter, because — “Yeah — yeah, it’s got good taste —”

The beat plays through for a few minutes while Quentin watches, mesmerized, frozen in place. Then it stops and he grabs a mug from the cabinet and opens up the lid, just to peek — it sure _looks_ like coffee, dark and steaming and smelling strong and fresh; he thinks the grinds might be totally gone — before he pours, opens the fridge for a splash of soy milk for good measure, and takes a sip, which —

“Not to brag,” he says, unable to keep a grin off his face, “but — that’s fucking good coffee.”

“Holy shit,” says Luisa. “Can I try?”

“Damn, now I kinda want some,” says Nico.

Quentin gets to pouring them each a cup, delighting in their intrigued excitement and in the scent of the coffee, the real actual coffee, that his spell made, and in the fact that it doesn’t look anything like he expected but there’s no denying that it fucking worked — his spell, his magic, his busting his ass for months to put together the pieces he needed, the lunar circumstances and the conversations with the empty air and the listening to the magic and the fucking worm castings — all of that to make this: new magic, strange and complete. An object mended and made new, with his magic living on inside it. Quentin feels — breathless, electrified, wide awake, beyond words. Unbreakable but not like stone, or steel: unbreakable like water, or magic. Unbreakable like something vast and dynamic and always moving, something that can split apart and come together and always be exactly itself. Something that doesn’t need to guard itself — that just is. He feels —

— alive.

So fucking alive. Every cell of him, every living piece of skin and sinew and muscle and bone, moving with life and it feels so right — it feels so fucking good, it feels — Quentin can barely believe it — better than dying. Yes. This, here; this, now; this tiny creation, this infinitesimal slice of newness — it’s better than that was. Better than death, better than forgetting, better than any secret door — this little thing he made, by sticking around long enough to make it — it’s better than any of that. Because it’s real and it’s good and it’s his.

He’s tearing up, he realizes; he wipes his eyes, too thrilled to be embarrassed. Luisa’s talking to him, he realizes, saying they should celebrate their joint victories, and — he should do a lot of things, he should send Julia the video, and Josh too, come to think of it, he’ll be fucking psyched and frankly he should be, and Quentin owes him big, and he should get started on writing this up for real because honestly it’s _completely awesome_ , he did a _completely awesome_ thing, and who _wouldn’t_ want to publish it, but —

“Yeah,” he says, “we fucking should celebrate, right? Like — I mean, I'd go right back to the bar, next round's on me, but also — and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but — we should have a party? I mean —” He laughs. He feels like he’s made of air. “I don’t know, it’s been a while, right, and I’m in like the best mood of my entire life, and you have a job, it just feels right. Saturday’s the first, right? We can make it like — May flowers, spring vibes. Not that that fucking means anything here, but — I wanna do something _fun_.”

“I always wanna do something fun,” Luisa says, “this can all definitely be arranged.”

“Especially if you were serious about buying me a drink,” Nico says, shoving fully like the last third of his sandwich into his mouth.

“I was dead serious,” Quentin says, and then laughs again because — like, he literally was, and he’s not anymore.

*

He wraps up Edine’s gift the next day, marathoning the final stretch to the Manic Street Preachers while he’s still buzzing with energy too triumphant to be nervous, bouncing on his toes the entire time. He keeps taking out his phone to look at the grinning selfie Julia sent in response to the video; she’s already said she’s in for Saturday, and in a burst of good spirits while the final locator spell is tuning itself he texts her to let her know anyone else is invited, who wants to come. Maybe no one will, but like — they might. It would be nice to see them — his friends.

In the evening he takes the rock he’d settled on as the spell’s final home and heads out to the beach, feeling the salty breeze and the golden Southern sun warm but not oppressive dimming as the sun drifts down towards the water. It feels good to have the air on his skin and the sand beneath his feet, slipping beneath his flip-flops and his heels; it feels good just to be. To be himself, Quentin Coldwater. A person who did something fucking right, because he wanted to. Quentin knows this won’t last long, but — he’s glad to ride it out, as long as it lasts.

Quentin walks up to the very edge of the bay, letting the water roll over past his ankles. In and out; in and out. Always moving. He holds the rock, charmed to find its recipient, loaded with music he hopes she’ll like, and he thinks about everything he’s had to say goodbye to. Some of it he still misses; some of it he’s still sorry for. But none of it feels like it’s about to sink him to the depths. He pictures his dark double in the Abyss, his endless litany of ugliness and faults, and he imagines telling him: well, maybe. Maybe that’s all true. Maybe I’m a coward and an asshole and a selfish prick; maybe I break things and I hurt people and I keep fucking up. But I fixed something, too. That shit’s not all of me, if I have any say in it. And it turns out maybe I do.

He remembers suddenly — sitting on the porch, talking to Eliot last summer when he couldn’t imagine yet a way out of wanting to die. Eliot telling him that he’d found his way through the monster’s trap by seeing that it had been a choice, the thing he didn’t want to look at; this worst thing he carried, and he let it go when he realized that could have chosen differently, all along. Quentin thinks he’s had to learn that half a dozen times and still he isn’t free; he thinks there might be more to come, somewhere in the subterranean darkness where he keeps tripping on regrets he can’t answer for or explain, like maybe they’ll never end. But he thinks that Eliot was right, anyway, after all, because that was how it began. That’s how it keeps beginning. A fresh start, every time.

One of these days, Quentin should probably tell him.

He bends over and sets the rock into the surf, tutting to get it moving. He watches it propel itself through the water until it disappears from sight; then he stays a little longer, looking out at the horizon while the sun dips down.

Then he takes out his phone and texts Eliot about the party. Julia will pass it on, if she hasn’t already, but Quentin feels like Eliot should hear it straight from him, too — so Eliot will know: Quentin wants him there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halfway there seems like a good time to pop in and say: to everyone who had made it through literally a hundred thousand words of a Queliot fic where they do not even talk, you're a real one; thanks for waiting it out ♥


	7. Chapter 7

Quentin wakes up on Saturday morning and goes for a run even though he went for a run yesterday because it’s nice out and it’s kind of neat to appreciate that he doesn’t wake up sore from jogging anymore. He joins Luisa in making brunch for the house because it’s nice to be helpful and she’s making these like banana multigrain pancakes with homemade berry compote, which apparently is a word, and it seems like a good recipe to keep playing around with magic in, and a useful one to know, like who doesn’t like pancakes. He cleans his room with as many non-kinetic cleaning spells as he knows, and then he does it again by hand, just to make sure he didn’t miss any spots, and then he does the same for the upstairs bathroom, because you can never clean your bathroom too much, right?

Luisa finds him on his knees scrubbing at the tub coated in the non-bleach cleaner Toni buys and says, “You know there are spells for that, right? That Cynthia did, like yesterday?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “I just thought — you know, it’s nice to have it really sparkling. Sometimes nothing beats a little elbow grease.”

“Uh huh,” she says skeptically. “And this has nothing to do with the fact that your ex-boyfriend is coming tonight?”

Quentin tries for a derisive laugh and lands somewhere closer to an asthmatic goose noise. “Psh. What? No. I — I forgot, actually, that — that was even tonight, or that he was coming, so — no. Don’t be ridiculous. This is just — I mean, we’re like, friends now, and that’s — great, and I’m doing great, so — everything’s great, and I’m not nervous. I just — felt like cleaning, is that a crime?”

“Ooookay,” she says, hands up in surrender. “I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need a paper bag to breathe into.”

“Very funny,” he calls after her. “But I won’t. Because I’m not nervous.”

Quentin is — not nervous. _That_ would be… stupid. He was not nervous when Eliot texted him back to say he’d be there and he was forced to confront seriously the prospect of existing in the same state as Eliot Waugh for the first time in over a year, and he was not nervous when Eliot called him after therapy yesterday and followed up a recap of Rafe and Abigail’s wedding — apparently a spectacular success, and his first real extravaganza as semi-official royal event planner, which made Quentin feel kind of fuzzy to contemplate — with a cheerful mention that he was looking forward to the party at which point Quentin had to contemplate the impending reality of seeing Eliot Waugh’s face and body with his own eyeballs and then make up an excuse to get off the phone before he had a heart attack, and he is definitely not nervous now, going through his Gmail archive and deleting old promotional messages one by one with Eliot set to arrive, as per Julia’s text, sometime in the next two hours.

Please. Like, literally why would he be nervous? Just because the last time he saw Eliot they had a sex marathon that left him screaming Eliot’s name and then a fight that broke his brain so bad he literally fled the state and drove across the country going completely insane? That’s not — it was a long time ago. Ancient history, basically. So. He’s not nervous. Quentin looks into the mirror above his desk and gives himself a slightly manic smile to remind himself of how not-nervous he is. He’s fine. He’s excited! He is — going to change his clothes.

He opens up his long-neglected drawer of folded and unused grown-up clothes, because like — fine. The first time he sees his objectively very attractive ex — that’s just a fact, okay, being broken up doesn’t mean he doesn’t have eyes — who is a million feet tall and probably the best-dressed person Quentin has ever met, although he’s going by reputation there because he doesn’t really know what makes outfits good or even really what makes them outfits as opposed to just, like, clothes — Quentin would, maybe, prefer this to happen while he’s dressed like an adult. Fucking sue him. That’s like, _allowed_. He’s allowed to decide that when Eliot sees him Eliot will think he looks — decent. He’s allowed to want Eliot to be a little — not, like, _impressed_ , obviously, just — he’s kind of got his shit together, and he’s allowed to want to look like he does, for once in his life. People want their exes to see them and think they have their shit together. That’s normal. Quentin feels like maybe it’s actually extra normal for him, given that the last time Eliot saw him he was completely losing his shit.

A dark button-down and a pair of jeans, both purchased in Boston and therefore carrying Julia’s seal of approval: that’s fine. See, he’s not after anything fancy, he just wants to look — okay. He’s maybe a little more relieved than he’d like to be, putting them on to discover that none of the buttons tug at the fabric and that the jeans slide up easily over his hips and fasten without protest, but — whatever. He’s allowed to appreciate having external evidence that he’s now a person who does things other than drinking himself comatose and shoving fried dough into his mouth until the only emotion he’s capable of feeling is nausea. It’s not — maybe it’s a _little_ vain, but — mostly it’s the other thing.

Quentin looks himself over. He looks — fine? His clothes fit, and after a quick ironing spell Luisa taught him they look more “young professional” than “college student late for an exam.” His beat-up Converse are… unobtrusive; he didn’t bring anything else with him from New York, so it’s either those or the running shoes. He never did get into the habit of UV-protection through magic or sunscreen, but the pink peeling burn he’d sported his first dazed few weeks wandering around has settled since into a light bronze-y tan, which Quentin thinks is supposed to mean he’ll be extra-wrinkled when he’s old but he’s pretty sure he’s been a lost cause on that front for years, so. For now it looks — fine. His skin has cleared up, at least; no dark circles under his eyes. The hair — he wishes now he’d gotten it cut, but it’s too late for that now; it’s like, clean though, falling straight down past his chin. He looks okay, he thinks. If you saw him on the street, you wouldn’t look twice, but you wouldn’t think _boy, that guy has a lot going on_ , either. He thinks. He’s pretty sure.

The party is solidly underway — not as crowded as it’ll probably get later, but the music is blasting and laughter is filling the house — when the crew from New York rolls in. By that point Quentin has talked himself into and out of starting off the evening with a couple of weed cookies (pros: calming down, not that he needs to; cons: not sure he wants to know what would come out of his mouth) approximately half a dozen times and it’s sort of a relief to finally move past the — anticipation, that’s a good word for it. Alice apparently has early morning library business tomorrow, although Quentin wouldn’t blame her for just not being into it, and Josh has a celebratory dinner for some cousin who got into Brown — Josh maybe has a _lot_ of cousins — which Quentin was surprised to find… disappointing? He’d kind of wanted to watch Josh see the coffee maker work in person. Everyone else is here though: Julia, who pulls him immediately into a fortifying hug before trotting off to find someone she’s apparently been texting with about access stuff since the last time she was here; Kady and both Pennys, waving hello before heading for the drinks table; and at each other’s sides, looking as ever like visitors from some beautiful and shining planet here to experience Earth culture and finding themselves unimpressed, Margo with red lips and glossy matching nails, and — Eliot.

“Q,” says Eliot. “Hi.” He — sure is tall, still.

“Hey,” says Quentin, trying to appear chill. His heart is pounding. He should — hug Eliot? No. Not hug Eliot. Fuck. Shake hands? Start a conversation? Like a real conversation or like, generic how’s it going? He — should let Eliot get to the party, it’s not like Eliot’s expecting to sit and talk to Quentin all night. But he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to see Quentin, probably, so actually — 

“Thanks for the invite,” says Margo, and Quentin is absurdly grateful to her for talking. “All work and no play was making me a pissed off king.”

“Glad you could get away,” he says, looking at her maybe too deliberately. This is not — this was a bad plan.

Then rescue arrives in the form of Toni enthusing “Margo, right? So good to see you again,” to Margo’s _very_ raised eyebrows.

“Oh, you guys haven’t met, right?” says Quentin to Eliot, not quite looking him in the eye. He latches on to the excuse to busy himself introducing Eliot and Margo to everyone he can find that he knows, about which Eliot is very polite and Margo visibly does not care. It is inane and probably more transparently desperate than he’s trying to come across, but it does not require him to have an actual conversation, which is enough because he’s not sure he can. They catch Luisa in the back of the room and she smiles and shakes their hands and then turns to Quentin and says, “Hey, could you help me with something?”

Nearly sagging with relief he gives Eliot and Margo an apologetic “Sorry, guys, one sec,” before following Luisa into the kitchen. “What’s up?”

She shrugs. “Nothing, you just looked like you could use an assist and I figured if I was wrong you could just head back out.”

“You are a hero and a saint,” he tells her, “and I need a fucking beer.” He gets one out of the fridge and leans against the counter, taking deep breaths. Out in the living room he can’t see Margo anymore but Eliot, head and shoulders above the crowd as always, seems to be chatting amiably with red mass of curls he’s pretty sure belongs to Cynthia. That’s… good, probably. “You don’t have to like, babysit me,” he says. “I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?” she says.

Quentin takes a drink, counts to ten. “Yeah, you know what, let’s, um — this is stupid, let’s go back.”

He doesn’t exactly _avoid_ Eliot, but he — finds other things to do. It helps to have a slight buzz going and something in his hand, and he lets himself fifth-wheel Kady and Nico talking about the several mutual acquaintances they apparently have, mostly via Harriet; he makes small talk with Book Club Marcia; he meets Book Club Tess’s boyfriend, who it turns out is really into camping, like, into it enough that he’ll expound for several minutes unprompted on the beauty of the great outdoors at night, which — you know, good for him. He’s feeling better by the time he makes it over to the drinks table — better enough to pour himself a soda because, yeah, maybe he finished his beer a little fast. He’s noticed lately that his tolerance is not what it used to be, which — he doesn’t really know how to feel about that.

Penny walks over to grab a beer, nods a greeting. “I think Twenty-Three is hitting on your friend, so if that’s gonna be weird for you now’s the time to intervene.”

Quentin glances around the room until he spots Twenty-Three. “Oh, Jenny — yeah, whatever. I don’t care. I mean — not that I don’t care about her as a person, but — not weird. She’s a little intense, but.”

Penny clicks his tongue. “That tracks.”

Quentin looks at him, pondering the inherent mindfuck of watching your alternate universe self try to score. “Do you guys just tell people you’re twins, or what?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Penny says with a shrug. “I used to know a pair of twins back in Florida. Honestly if anything they were weirder about it than we are. I mean we’re literally psychic and we still don’t do that creepy finishing each other’s sentences thing.”

Twenty-Three smirks; Jenny gives him a playful smack on the arm. “This must be really existentially heavy for you.”

“You get used to it,” Penny says with a shrug. “Maybe it’s easier for me — my whole life was an existential crisis until I learned to turn that shit off. So my baseline normal’s already off. But — is it really that much weirder than anything else we’ve gotten used to in the past couple years?”

Quentin watches the ex-boyfriend he raised a child who doesn’t exist with lean over to plant a forehead on the kiss of the High King of Fillory while his childhood best friend sashays over to make something that makes them laugh. “I guess not.”

Julia finds him a few minutes later, wraps her arm around his waist with cozy presumption. “You good?”

“I’m good,” he says, leaning for a second against her shoulder. He is. He’s tipsy but not getting drunker, he’s with people he likes who like him, his best friend is here. The speakers are playing a song he likes — that one big Franz Ferdinand hit, off an album that didn’t really live up to the single, but that stomping beat still shakes through him, loud and sure.

“I meant about — Eliot.”

Quentin straightens up, sighs. Tries to think of how to explain that him and Eliot are fine and they’re friends and it’s chill but also he can’t talk to or be alone with him. “I’m — okay. I am,” he says in response to her brows knitting together. “But it’s — I don’t know, we’ve talked on the phone a couple times, and it’s been — awkward, but nice, pretty much. I don’t know why this is so much weirder. I mean it’s not like I’m — I’m not freaking out, I’m not fucked up about it — like, I’m drinking fucking Sprite, is how not fucked up about it I am — I’m just — weird.”

Julia presses her lips together. “I think it’s always weird, hanging out with an ex. Even when it really is all over.”

Quentin considers this hypothesis. “It wasn’t this weird seeing Alice. I mean — a little, but — we got over it, pretty much.”

She gives him a kind smile. “Not to sound harsh, but — I think you and Alice were over before you were over, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.” As opposed to him and Eliot, who couldn’t fucking end it even after they’d both tried. “Maybe you have a point.”

“It’s like — you don’t know what’s allowed, right?” she says.

“Okay, yeah — _that_ part, definitely I agree,” he says, grateful. “Like, do we hug because we’re friends and friends hug, like, we’re definitely both huggers, or is that weird now because I’ve seen you naked?”

“Exactly,” she says, laughing. “Or, is it nice if I ask about your mom, or is it weird because I’m not going to be coming over for Thanksgiving again, and now we’re both just remembering that I used to? You’re not dating anymore, but you’re — it’s almost like you have to make friends with each other again, except now you know all this shit no one knows about someone they’re just becoming friends with. It’s weird.”

“Alright. You’ve convinced me,” he says, relieved. “It’s totally weird. I feel totally fucking weird about it. But — I feel better now. Thanks, Jules.”

She squeezes his hand and smiles.

Yeah — it’s weird that Quentin is hyper-aware of where Eliot is at any given moment, because he’s so used to having Eliot take up such a huge portion of his brain. It’s weird that Quentin keeps catching himself sneaking glances at Eliot but when he tries to imagine just going over and talking to him, he feels like his legs are in a vise. It’s weird that his body hasn’t gotten the fucking message about the break-up and when Eliot tilts back his head to drink something some unfortunate part of his reptile brain can’t help admiring the curve of his throat. It’s weird, but it was always going to be weird, probably, so — it’s okay. He can live with weird. He’s lived with worse.

So he tries to let the weirdness just — be. Just hover like a cartoon stormcloud following him harmlessly around while he enjoys the party that was his own fucking idea. He drops into a drinking game Nico has going on the couch for a few rounds, cuts out when he feels his balance tilting further than expected. He checks in with Margo, asks about Fillory (“ _Love_ the impulse, Q, sincerely, but I’m here to forget that for a few hours”) and tries to be helpful regarding Margo’s surprising level of interest on the topic of Toni’s whole deal (“Uh, I dunno, she’s cool? She does the crossword and likes the environment and stuff?”) and it feels sort of like a conversation they might have had at school right before things really went to shit, almost like they’re fast-forwarding through the path of their friendship. He tries to give Twenty-Three a bro-ish thumbs up that earns him an eye-roll, and hangs back with Penny while they watch Julia, Kady, and Luisa daydream tipsily about what could be built in a world where every magician wanted to help magic grow.

He’s doing such a good job letting it be that he’s forgotten it entirely, washed away by the buzz of demonstrating the coffee maker at Julia’s insistence to sardonic but not insincere applause, by the time he wanders over to the drinks table, trying to decide if he should stick to soda a little longer or can go another round, and bumps right into Eliot.

“Oh, hey,” Eliot says, smiling and stepping so they can talk without being in the way, which — great. _He_ doesn’t look like anything’s weird. He looks — tall. So, so tall.

“Hey,” Quentin says, trying to ignore the heat beneath his ribs. He opts for a beer. “Are you having fun?”

“I am,” says Eliot. “It’s a good crowd. I was talking to someone who lives here — Cynthia, I think? She seems cool.”

“Yeah, she’s great,” Quentin says. “I mean, they all are — I got pretty lucky, I guess.” When he crash-landed his life on the opposite side of the country with barely even a Plan A. Yeah, lucky might be an understatement. He wonders how much of this Eliot is parsing in his head.

“I’m glad,” Eliot says, in a soft voice that suggests the answer is — at least some. “You look good.”

Quentin scratches at the label on the bottle. “I thought you said I always looked good,” he says before he can stop himself, because he has something very wrong with him deep inside.

Eliot quirks his mouth, looking amused. “I said you were always _hot_ ,” he clarifies smoothly. “That’s not the same thing.”

“Yeah, well.” Quentin shrugs, half relieved at how lightly Eliot’s taking his apparent inability to be normal about it, half uncomfortable with the compliment. “I can button my jeans without a safety pin again, so. That’s something.”

Eliot rolls his eyes. “You _know_ that’s not what I meant.” He sounds a little too earnest for Quentin’s liking, but Quentin probably can’t blame him.

“I know,” he says. “Sorry. I’m just — I don’t know why I said that.”

“It’s fine.” Eliot’s being very polite. Quentin should probably try to play along. “Congratulations on cracking the coffee maker, by the way.”

“Oh, thanks,” Quentin says. “Do you — want to see it?” That’s — something to do, right?

Eliot gives him a smile like he really likes this idea. “Sure.”

Quentin weaves through the crowd to lead him to the kitchen. On the way he wonders if he should grab Margo, too, but he doesn’t. He sets up a small batch and watches it go, not quite looking at Eliot.

“The White Stripes, really?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Sorry it picked one of the greatest rock bands of the aughts over Kelly Minogue.”

“Kylie.”

“Or her."

It wraps up its song and Quentin pours, adding a dash of soy milk and — he thinks he’s remembering this right — a pinch of — they don’t have Sweet’n’Low, stevia will have to do — before handing it to Eliot. “Ta-da, or whatever.”

He manages to look at Eliot’s face then, and it’s — it’s a good face, delighted and curious and kind of impressed. That last one still feels like an accomplishment. “I love that,” Eliot says in that voice he uses when he forgets to be on, and Quentin smiles because — yeah, he knows. Eliot does love this kind of shit: little magics with a personal flair; new ideas used in unexpected ways. “So — you grew this? Like, in a pot?”

“In a garden, actually,” Quentin says, “or a part of one — I could show you that too, if you want.” He takes a drink. He’s keeping his breathing very steady.

There’s the briefest of pauses — maybe there isn’t; maybe Quentin’s imagining it — before Eliot sets the mug on the counter and says “Yeah, definitely.” They slip out of the kitchen and around to the front door and out into the night.

Quentin walks them over to the plot he’s been using, empty now. “It’s not much to look at,” he says. “But this is where the magic happened, so to speak.” He crouches down to indicate the spot. The little blue flower is fading crumpled in the corner.

Eliot looks at the patch of soil with interest. “So how does it work?”

Quentin sits balanced on the wooden frame. Eliot joins him, perching on the adjacent side, legs looking absurdly long this close to the ground. “So,” Quentin starts, “I was testing it out on these plates, right…”

He takes Eliot through the entire process, more or less. He doesn’t mention that he slept with the hauntologist who taught him about Taniyama Pools, or that the idea of using inanimate cultivation came to him because he was thinking about the kid they never had, and he omits the various crises of faith that plagued him along the way. But he goes through some of his more interesting early failures, and the house in La Jolla, and the feedback from book club, and Josh’s assistance, and the practice with vernacular magic that he thinks might have given him the skill as a magician he needed to work closely enough with the magic of the broken object to make it something whole. By the time he wraps up he’s finished his beer and Eliot has finished the wine he was nursing and Quentin feels like he’s caught him up not just on the spell but on himself: life he’s been building here, out of sight.

“I can’t get over how cool that is,” Eliot says. “I think — it seems like you’re doing really well out here.”

Quentin feels more settled now, having laid it all out like that, in his own voice. Like by telling the story, he remembered it was true. “Yeah. I think I am, actually.” He looks up at Eliot then and it doesn’t feel weird; it just feels like Eliot. Suddenly it’s washing over him so that he doesn’t even have to try — “I’m so fucking sorry, El. About — everything. I’m sorry about the sex and the fight and all the stupid shit I said, and I’m sorry about the fucking phone calls, and making fun of your therapist, and just — all of it, I’m sorry about all of it.”

Eliot gives him a small smile. “You don’t have to —”

“Maybe not,” Quentin says, trying not to be exasperated by Eliot’s kneejerk absolution, “but — I mean it.”

Eliot nods, slowly. “Thank you. And — for what it’s worth, I’m sorry too.”

Quentin almost says _For what_ , but he doesn’t think he can handle Eliot’s undoubtedly depressing answer. “I really don’t think there was anything you could have done that would have made any of it better,” he says instead. “And meanwhile I did just about everything humanly possible to make it worse, so.”

Eliot bites his lip like he’s thinking of responding to that, but he just says, “I’m really glad you called, a couple weeks ago.”

Quentin lets out a breath. “Me too.” He sets his empty bottle on the ground, next to Eliot’s cup. “I’m really glad you came tonight.”

“Me too.” 

Eliot smiles, and Quentin smiles back. He feels warm and lucky. Behind them he can hear the waves’ gentle hush as they roll in and out on the sand. Eliot’s eyes are fond and kind and the night feels very still.

Quentin’s stomach twists. It feels like they’ve been looking at each other a long time, but — no; Eliot wouldn’t — it’s the beer, he thinks. It’s stretching everything out. When he goes inside he’ll switch back to soda. They still haven’t looked away. That doesn’t mean anything. Probably it just got weird, because they’re friends and they’re exes and they’re figuring shit out like _how long are we allowed to sit under the stars and stare into each other’s smiling eyes_ , and now neither of them wants to draw attention to that by looking away, so —

Eliot laughs, ducks his chin; Quentin laughs too, spell broken. Something shoots through the back of his neck like — relief? Relief, probably. Because that’s what would make sense.

He should say something; or Eliot should say something, he’s better at starting conversations. Maybe not; maybe being exes means they get to skip to the part where none of the silences are awkward, like Columbia afternoons spent studying across the room from Julia. Quentin — his gut is burning and his pulse is picking up the pace but he doesn’t feel — awkward, actually. He feels — he wishes he hadn’t finished his beer.

They’re not — it was in his head. It was the memory of the dream of a thought, barely, and it’s not — so, and what Quentin’s going to do is, he’s going to turn his face very slowly towards Eliot, and if Eliot doesn’t — which Eliot won’t, because — this is all a big nothing. It’s nothing and he’s turned towards Eliot eyes on the wooden frame where Eliot is sitting and he’s going to lift his face and when he lifts his head if Eliot’s not looking at him then — and Eliot won’t be looking at him because why would Eliot look at him — but this way he’ll just be sure, right — he’s going to prove it to himself and then it’ll be done no harm no foul — so he lifts his head up just to be sure —

— he lifts his head and Eliot is looking at him and his eyes are dark and his mouth is just slightly open —

— Quentin doesn’t know which one of them moves first, if either of them does; it doesn’t feel like it’s his fault but it doesn’t feel like Eliot’s doing it, either. It feels like falling into orbit, like slipping through the atmosphere to the Earth’s gravitational pull; it feels like they’re following something physical and inarguable, same as the tides follow the moon —

— they move in tandem and then they’re kissing, no warm-up, right into hot and heavy mouths open tongues deep teeth scraping lips hands reaching for each other like they’re fucking magnetized, Eliot’s hand solid at the back of his neck and beneath Quentin’s palms Eliot’s shoulders, his waist, they’re kissing like people fucking possessed, deep, deep, the sound of their halting breath —

“Fuck,” Eliot says, backing up. His voice is rough and Quentin really shouldn’t like that but —

“Sorry,” Quentin says, unable to stop looking at his red wet mouth, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have —”

“No, you didn’t, it’s fine, I shouldn’t —”

“I’m sorry —” Quentin says but he’s already leaning closer —

“It’s not —” Eliot says bending down —

— fucking _fuck_ , Eliot is fucking _good_ at this, is the problem here. Quentin is trying, like really really trying here, to send up fucking semaphores reading _FRIENDS! FRIENDS! WE’RE BEING FRIENDS!_ , but his mouth wants Eliot’s mouth and his back wants Eliot’s hands and worst of all every time he thinks _THIS ABSOLUTELY CANNOT GO ON_ his idiot dick shoots back _THAT MAKES IT SO MUCH BETTER_ —

“Okay,” Quentin manages. His hands are still touching Eliot’s arms but — one step at a time. “Okay this is — this is a bad idea —”

“Right,” Eliot says, nodding vigorously, “absolutely, it’s — a terrible idea, just — awful — worse than the time Margo and I invited a bunch of horomancers to Eighties Night —”

“It’s not even an _idea_ ,” Quentin says, forcing his hands back to his sides, ignoring his body’s unasked for opinion of Eliot insisting they shouldn’t while looking at Quentin like he’s starving and Quentin is a steak, “it’s just, like — old habits, or whatever, um —”

“Muscle memory,” Eliot chimes in.

“Uh huh,” Quentin says. “So — so if we just — don’t, then —” He stands up. It feels like it takes a lot of strength, but — yeah, this is good. He’s — upright, he’s looking at the road, he’s feeling in touch with the world outside of how fucking badly he wants Eliot’s fingers in his mouth —

“Sure,” Eliot says, following suit. He’s still nodding. “Like — you know, like quitting smoking, right, you — you want to go through the motions because you’ve gone through them a million times, but if you just — don’t, then your body, like, gets the message, so —”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. God he wishes he had a fucking cigarette. “I quit smoking, actually,” he says, to distract himself from the craving.

“Really?” Eliot gives him an inquisitive smile. It’s a pretty unhorny look, so. Progress.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well — I spent a couple months quitting it like two dozen times, but, um — this one’s stuck, so far.”

Eliot’s eyes go soft, which — it does not feel like he’s being a team player, here. “I’m really proud of you, Q.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Quentin says helplessly, and kisses him again.

Standing is so much fucking _worse_ , god. Eliot is so fucking long that it should be more inconvenient than hot like this, and in other less deranged times frankly it has been — there was a stepstool they used to use, back in Fillory — but right now all Quentin can think about the fact that he’s standing on his goddamn tippy-toes to get kissed like the heroine of some trashy bodice-ripping paperback is a humiliating caveman voice in the back of his hand chanting _TALL, TALL, TALL._ Eliot’s holding him possessively at the small of his back and Quentin should not fucking be beelining straight for grabbing Eliot’s ass but he _is_ and it’s a _good_ ass —

“We should stop,” Eliot says breathlessly, fisting the back of Quentin’s shirt in his hand.

“We should definitely stop,” Quentin says, and opens Eliot’s top button so he can bite at his collarbone.

Eliot moans and Quentin says “ _Fuck_ ” and then they’re kissing again, kissing like drowning men gulping water, Quentin’s hips have started grinding up against any part of Eliot he can find as he’s stiffening up with _alarming_ speed and completely unable to keep himself from chasing _more, more, more_ and Eliot is — oh fuck him _fuck him_ — using a goddamn telekinetic assist to lift Quentin up so they’re face to face with Quentin’s arms around Eliot’s neck so Eliot can go and fucking _suck_ at his _neck_ like Jesus _Christ_ — Quentin tugs at his hair to bring his face up and god help him Eliot looks fucking half-concussed with how bad he wants him and Quentin kisses him again, shivering in the web of his desire —

“Stop,” says some voice of mature judgment in him miraculously swimming against the current. “Eliot. El. Put me down, we can’t —”

Eliot obeys, quickly but gently, and Quentin — looking wistfully at Eliot’s hair, dark curls a mess — makes himself take a step back. “We can’t do this,” Quentin says, regretting that it comes out more desperate than firm.

“You’re right,” Eliot says, doing the anxious nodding thing again, “you’re absolutely right, we can’t — it’s a bad idea, we really shouldn’t —”

“Eliot,” Quentin says roughly, shifting his weight from foot to foot, “you gotta stop —”

“We’ve gotta stop,” Eliot says, and Quentin practically bites his bottom lip in half, “we have to stop this, we cannot do this —”

“No,” Quentin pleads, “like, you’ve got to stop saying that, okay, I can’t —”

“— Oh,” Eliot says, finally clueing into the situation. “Right. Sorry.” He darts a quick look down at Quentin’s unfortunately tented jeans which — should be embarrassing, and is embarrassing, but is unfortunately also very hot. Quentin grits his teeth and tries to take deep calming breaths. Breathe in to your belly, and out to the universe, like Alana says, which — okay, that’s annoying enough to be a boner-killer. In and out.

A car drives by down Riviera. Quentin counts to ten in his head, then counts to ten again, then does it one more time just to be safe. In as neutral a voice as he can manage he says, “I’m going to go inside, and then I’m going to go upstairs to my room. Just — to take a minute. Get some space. And then, um. Then I’ll go back to the party, and we’ll just — carry on. No big deal.” He keeps his eyes on the road.

“Yeah,” Eliot says. He sounds like he believes it, pretty much. “Totally. You — you’ll do that, and I’ll go find Margo, and —”

“Perfect,” Quentin says. Without looking at Eliot, trying to tamp down the fucking spider sense that keeps informing of him of precisely where Eliot’s body is in space at all times, he heads back to the house, swerving to go around through the back porch for the best chance of slipping in unnoticed. He walks through the party feeling like a shoplifting eighth grader, trying to project normalcy in a manner unobtrusive enough to avoid drawing attention. He’s very aware of his posture.

Quentin makes it into his bedroom without being flagged down by anyone and gives himself a moment to flop down on his bed with a groan. He was doing — _so_ well, and then — five seconds in Eliot’s actual presence and his dick took over the controls and — it’s fine. They did the mature thing and cut it off before it got out of hand, and no one got his feelings hurt and no one’s waking up anywhere he shouldn’t, and — Quentin’s just going to lie here and breathe for a few minutes and he’ll be fine. It’s — muscle memory, like Eliot said. They’re friends on the phone, but their bodies haven’t gotten the memo. That’s okay. Julia’s thing, about hanging out with your ex. It was always going to be weird, probably. So. They made it weird, and now they’re making it unweird.

Quentin waits for his hormones to settle, trying to think unsexy thoughts. Late papers. That one English teacher with the hair who did that weird slurping thing with his tongue when he lectured. Orcs reproducing. He sends kind of an exploratory signal down to his dick, but it seems down for the count. Good. That’s good. Quentin stands up, paces in his room a bit. He’s — he’s just waiting to be extra sure. He’s not waiting for — there’s nothing to wait for.

He tells himself he’ll leave in one minute, watches the clock on his broken phone count it out; waits another when it gets there; waits one more. And fine, maybe — maybe there’s a feather of disappointment down his chest as he realizes that Eliot isn’t coming. Which — of course Eliot isn’t coming; that would ruin the whole point. But maybe some dumb vestigial instinct kind of expected him to anyway. It’s good that he didn’t, though. Really. Quentin’s relieved. He’s going to go back downstairs and drink some soda and find his friends and have a nice time, just like he wanted.

He opens the door to find Eliot standing in the hall, looking down at him wild-eyed.

“Oh hey Eliot,” Quentin says, ignoring his stomach pole-vaulting into his throat. “What are you —”

“Fuck my life,” Eliot says, and steps forward to kiss him like it’s what Quentin’s mouth is for.

And Quentin — shudders, and collapses against him, and shuts the door behind them.

Eliot walks him backward over to the bed, hands roaming down Quentin’s arms and sides and back like he’s trying to prove Quentin is real; Quentin kisses him and kisses him and makes pathetic desperate noises into his mouth and kisses him some more. He half-trips onto the bed behind him, hoisting himself to lie on it in a tangle of limbs as Eliot climbs on top of him, long and intent and pressing tightly against him, rocking hips into hips and Quentin’s dick is _not_ down, it is very much at the ready as Eliot breaks from his mouth to bite with his hot breath at the rim of Quentin’s ear while Quentin makes some obscenely loud sound and Eliot fucking _laughs_ —

“Wait,” Quentin says, his last gasp of consciousness making itself known before checking out for the evening, “wait just — just one second —” Eliot sits up, huge hands hovering above Quentin’s body, and Quentin tries to ignore them as he musters up the will to say, “Just to be clear — you and me, we’re not — like, this is just —”

“Just sex,” Eliot fills in quickly, “yep, just — we’re just hooking up with our —”

“Our friends,” Quentin offers, “who happen to be our exes —”

“Right,” Eliot agrees, “which — okay, it’s not a _great_ idea, but —”

“But if it’s already started,” Quentin says, “like, it’s kind of a binary thing, right, like, either we hook up or we don’t, and since — since we already kind of _did_ , there’s no real additional harm that can —”

“Totally,” Eliot says, “what — what you said, exactly, it’s like — okay, it turns out we were both thinking it, and now that information’s out there, and it’s not coming back, so —”

“So in that case,” Quentin says, eager to feel the weight of Eliot’s body against him again, “since we both agree, then, uh — maybe take off your fucking shirt?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eliot hisses, and loosens his — _tie_ , goddammit, why is watching that so — Quentin rests his hands against Eliot’s thighs, mesmerized by the sight of his knuckles at his neck, feeling a shiver run through him as Eliot tosses it to the side and sends his shirt and vest to join it revealing that perfect dark trail and then like — _pounces_ on the buttons on his shirt, undoing them with manic energy. “This is a nice shirt, where the fuck did you get this shirt?” he whispers, so incredulously Quentin would be insulted if not for — well, yeah. 

“Boston,” he manages, hip bucking up as Eliot’s hands make their way to his stomach. “You like it?”

“Fuck you,” Eliot says, and Quentin makes a noise between a laugh and a groan because it’s funny but it’s so, so hot.

Eliot fucking _bites_ into his pec, hard, and Quentin writhes under the sensation and Eliot’s knowing hand smoothing at his waist. He needs to — touch Eliot, his skin, running his hands down his arms, his shoulderblades, the small of his back slick with sweat. Eliot lifts his head and Quentin catches his mouth in a kiss, sucks at his bottom lip to hear that little _mmf_ noise Eliot makes, cradles his face between his hands to keep kissing him while their cocks rub artlessly against each other down below.

“Margo’s gonna kill me,” Eliot says into Quentin’s mouth. “She is going to _kill_ me, I can’t believe —”

“Tell her it was my fault,” Quentin says, nipping at Eliot’s jaw. “Tell her I seduced you —”

“She’ll never believe that,” says Eliot.

Quentin snorts. “Then she doesn’t know you as well as she thinks she does, because I wasn’t the one who showed up at your fucking door.”

“Oh Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Eliot whines, sounding somehow both indignant and aroused.

“Tell her I’m a bad influence,” Quentin says, “she’ll believe that —”

“You are,” Eliot breathes, rolling his hips against Quentin slow and firm, “you’re so fucking bad, you’re terrible, you’re the goddamn worst —”

“Oh, _fuck_ —” Quentin drinks the words in like fucking tequila shots, discombobulating him. “I’m — I’m awful, I ruined it, I —” Is this doing it for him? That is so much weirder than getting off on Eliot making him call himself a cockslut, like, _god_. “I can’t be trusted,” he pants. “You oughta, you oughta tie me the fuck up, so I don’t —”

Eliot makes a face like his brain shut down without warning, then scrambles to find — _yes_ , fuck, his fucking tie. “Hands above your fucking head,” he spits, harsh and commanding while he eyes Quentin’s bare chest hungrily up and down.

Quentin reaches up so fast he almost strains something and Eliot makes quick unshowy work of binding his wrists together — his hard-on fucking _hurts_ — and tying them to the headboard. “That’s not too tight, is it?” Eliot asks, hands still in place.

Quentin wiggles his arms, nearly collapsing at the shockwaves the restraint sends through his body. “A little tighter.”

Eliot’s eyes go wide but he doesn’t say anything, just cooperates — _fuck_. “There we go,” says Eliot, like he’s trying for casual but there’s a note of wonder he can’t keep out of his voice, like the sight of Quentin tied up for him is — Quentin feels like he’s about to black out. “Now where we?”

“I honestly don’t remember,” Quentin says, “but, El, if you don’t touch my dick soon I’m gonna burst a fucking blood vessel.”

He’s kind of expecting Eliot to play it cool, tease him a little, which would be both hot and infuriating, but Eliot is apparently too out of his own mind to bother, because he just says “Roger fucking _that_ ,” and goes for the button on Quentin’s jeans.

And that’s when Margo comes in.

“Alright, boys,” she announces, flinging the door open, “let’s all make like thirteen-year-olds at a Catholic school Valentine’s Day dance and leave some room for the Holy Ghost.”

“Bambi, hi,” Eliot says, sitting up and raking his hair back, “we were just about to…”

Margo glares at him. “I know what you were just about to, and I’m here to make sure it doesn’t happen. As requested in advance.”

“Okay.” says Eliot, holding up his palms, “but that was then, and this —”

“No.” Margo shakes her head, mouth a stern line. “You said, Eliot. You said this was going to happen and I had to make sure it didn’t.”

“I know what I said, but —”

“You said,” Margo goes on, jabbing a finger at him, “ _Bambi, he’s going to be there and he’s probably all like tan or whatever from living in SoCal and I bet his bangs are way too long in that way that really shouldn’t work for him but does —_ which it doesn’t, by the way, you’re just biased _— and he’s going to look up at me with those sexy sad Beagle eyes, and he’s going to look so cute, and at some point he’s going to laugh with those fucking dimples, and I’m going to be weak, which is why I need you, Margo, benevolent yet firm ruler and best friend in the entire universe, to be strong for me._ And that’s what I’m doing, so — cover your tits and get out.”

“But —”

“You made me promise,” Margo says. “You made me vow our most sacred vow.”

Eliot attempts a casual laugh. It’s pretty unconvincing. “It’s really fine, Bambi, I swear, it’s totally chill.”

Margo takes a step forward, hands on her hips. “You told me you were going to insist that it was, verbatim quote, ‘totally chill’ — a phrase you _acknowledged_ you have _never once used without lying_ — and then you made me swear to you on Rihanna’s 2017 Met Gala red carpet outfit — the Commes des Garçons year, Eliot — that I would not believe you, so let’s go.” Reluctantly Eliot swings his leg around to get off the bed and pick up his shirt. Quentin’s dick has not gotten any less hard, which he is choosing not to interrogate.

While Eliot is dressing himself with the demeanor of a man condemned, Margo turns to face Quentin, waves her fingers smiling. “Hey, Q.”

“Hey, Margo,” he says mildly.

“This is nothing personal,” she assures him. “But a promise is a promise, so.”

“No I get that,” he says. “I wouldn’t want you to disrespect Rihanna.”

“Your friends throw a pretty decent party for a bunch of fucking hippies,” says Margo. “And worm lady is a shockingly good dancer."

“Toni?” says Quentin. “Yeah, she’s fun.”

Margo holds up a hand to the side of her mouth to stage whisper. “Kinda thought we had a little May-December vibe going, but — duty calls. El, I don’t have all night.” She shakes her head at Eliot’s very slow journey to re-do his buttons. “If you hurry up while I’m still in a good mood, I’ll give you a consolation beej when we get back.”

“She is really good at those,” Eliot tells Quentin a little mournfully, slinging his vest on.

Quentin cocks an eyebrow. “Better than me?”

Margo rounds on him. “And when did this one get a mouth on him?”

Eliot is very focused suddenly on his cufflinks. “I plead the fifth.”

“Oh my god, she’s _not_ ,” Quentin cries, delighted.

“I plead the fifth!” Eliot protests.

“She’s scarier than me,” Quentin says. “If she were better you’d just say it.”

“Excuse me,” Margo interrupts, steely. “Window rapidly closing on that offer.”

Eliot takes one last sad look at Quentin’s body lying stretched out and half-naked, then stands up with a sigh. “I’m sorry, Q.”

Quentin shrugs as best he can under the circumstances. “No, this is probably the right choice for everyone involved. But, uh — could someone maybe untie me?”

Eliot leans in but Margo holds a hand out. “Ah-ah-ah. You go make yourself presentable, I’ll take care of bondage Ken doll over here.” Eliot walks out of the room, resignation in his shoulders.

Quentin has the passing thought that Margo might just leave him there as punishment, but she comes over to undo the knots, looking pissed.

“Don’t feel bad,” he says. “I can give you some tips if you want.”

Margo narrows her eyes into slits. “Let’s get this straight. You do _not_ suck better cock than me. Eliot is a sentimental dumbass. It’s ruined his objectivity.”

“Practice makes perfect,” he says encouragingly. “Never give up on your dreams.”

“I ought to bite yours off,” she mutters, but she finishes untying him and he shakes his wrists out.

“Thanks,” he says, sitting up to shrug back into his shirt. He’s in a weirdly good mood for someone who just hooked up with his ex. Maybe it’s just the beer.

Margo studies him a moment. “It seems like things are going well for you out here. I’m really glad.”

Quentin rubs at his wrists. “That means a lot, Margo.”

She nods. “Well, I’ll give you some privacy to either finishing jacking it out or get your head back on straight. Oh, and —” She brings a hand to his face, framing it. “Honestly? The length is not the issue, you have the bone structure for it. Just go somewhere and ask them to give you some layers. That and just a noodge of product and you’ll be golden. There’s DIY recipes that work with a spell, you don’t have even do any styling if you’re not looking for anything fancy. You know I don’t love to fuck with off-brand magic, but some of them are pretty good. I can send you the info.”

Quentin laughs. Everything seems very funny right now. “That’d be great, yeah. Thanks.” Who knows? Maybe he’ll even use one.

*

Quentin wakes up the next morning feeling oddly buoyant, which seems counterintuitive considering Operation Hang Out With Eliot, Be Normal About It failed spectacularly by any conceivable assessment. Maybe he’s just relieved that he switched to soda early enough in the evening to avoid a hangover. He lies on his back for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the rest of the house waking up below, wondering if the truth of his abysmal performance last night is about to crash down on him as the fuzz of sleep fades from his brain. He doesn’t feel like he’s waiting for a punch to the balls from reality. He feels — settled, solid. Ready for a peaceful Sunday of going to yoga and drinking coffee and reading on the porch.

He grins up at the ceiling. It’s a weird benchmark to measure progress by, but — if he were looking for some standard of proof that it’s working, whatever _it_ is, that the months he’s spent trying and failing and trying and failing and trying to build some semblance of a life from the ground up have actually brought him out of the fucking pit he was in before, it’s hard to argue with this one.

Last night he hooked up with Eliot Waugh, and today life goes on.

He rolls out of bed to get dressed and head downstairs where Ray’s making French toast and scrambled eggs for whoever wants it. Toni looks up from her crossword to smile at him when he settles in with a mug of coffee to join the crew at the dining table. “Your friends are lovely, Quentin.”

“Yeah, I’m glad they could make it,” he says with a glance at Luisa. If she noticed his mid-party disappearance, she’s not giving it away. “It was a good time.”

The black-haired girl sitting in Nico’s lap who Quentin doesn’t — _think_ he’s met? — twists around to face the table. “Speaking of last night, the weirdest thing happened when we went out to the beach.”

“Oh shit, yeah,” says Nico. “We walked out to the edge of the selkie territory, and we heard these voices from the water, yeah?”

“That’s the selkies singing,” Ray calls from the kitchen. “They do that sometimes.”

“Selkie rituals are actually kind of fascinating,” says Cynthia. She gestures to Quentin to pass the jam and he obliges. “I was reading a book about the religious practices of magical beings — their sacred calendar uses some incredibly complex astronomical calculations.”

“I’ve heard them singing before, that wasn’t the weird part,” says Nico, shaking his head. “The weird part was — I could fucking swear it sounded like they were singing Fleetwood Mac.”

Quentin bursts into laughter.

*

He sets aside further adventures in spellcraft for the time being to focus on getting his protocol for inanimate cultivation drafted into something coherent enough to send out on submission, which seems like enough of a project for the time being. The materials are easy enough, as are the results. The procedure will be _long_ , especially if he includes even just the most interesting failed attempts along the way which he feels like he should, but it’s straightforward enough to describe what he did; the one tricky part will be the non-classical manipulation he used in the last planting, but he can’t get too stressed about trying to articulate a way of doing magic no one seems to have bothered to write down.

It’s the big-picture shit that’s going to take real work, the lit review and the intro and the discussion. He needs to figure out the best way to frame what he did theoretically — magicians write new spells all the time, but academic editors are looking for the ones that get at broader questions. Rishi seems pretty sure this qualifies, and Quentin’s instincts say he’s right, but he’s not sure how to communicate that to a disinterested panel of readers. He doesn’t even know if others will agree that what he did counts as mending, even though it sure as fuck feels like one; there might be previously recognized examples of mended objects that look nothing like their unbroken forms, but he’s not familiar with them.

Well. That’s what research is for. The _Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ has a deadline coming up in the first week of June; it’s a little tight, but it’s not like he has a job. He can start by browsing their archives on MSTOR and asking Rishi to send over the most relevant-looking articles; he should text Alice, too, to see if she can snag him some of the foundational texts on repair of small objects and more generally, the kind of shit he’s seen glossed in textbooks but never actually read himself. He has a month, he has a plan, he has a folder of PDFs to read and a Google doc with section headings to fill in. There’s nothing to do but get to work.

*

“So Patrick says he thinks he can put together a set-up that’ll let us use the globe to do readings,” Luisa says, fiddling with Marina’s compass. The plain metal needle moves of its own accord when she’s not touching it around an unmarked white base. “He had no idea what to make of this thing, though, and neither do I.”

“Have you tried doing magic around it?” Quentin asks.

“Yeah, obviously that was like the first thing I tried,” she said. “It keeps moving around, no matter what I’m doing. If there’s a pattern, or if it’s changing somehow, I can’t figure it out.”

The front door opens and Ray comes in, carrying grocery bags. He nods hello as he passes the table, then frowns at the compass. “Is that a bone amulet?”

Quentin and Luisa exchange glances of _no, I’ve never heard of that either_. “Maybe?” Luisa says. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Hang on a sec.” Ray sets the bags on the counter and quickly puts the groceries away before joining them at the table. He takes the compass from Luisa and picks it up, feeling the weight in his hands, regarding it; sets it on the table and looks at it through a simple L-shape revelation. “Damn. Haven’t seen one of these in a while.” Turning to the living room he calls, “Toni. Check this out.”

Toni walks over, eyes the object with a raised brow. “Is that —?”

“I think so,” says Ray.

“Wow, that takes me back,” she says dreamily. “Jess used to have one of those, remember her? God, she was a creep.”

“Sorry to interrupt all the nostalgic smiling,” Luisa says, “but are you guys gonna tell us what the fuck this thing is?”

“I’ve always heard it called a bone amulet,” Ray says. “Not sure why. They were big with the black star crowd — you used to see them on the kind of people who’d introduce themselves with their hedge levels.” He and Toni share an eyeroll.

“I dated a girl who had one, for a couple months,” says Toni. “She was like, _obsessed_ with battle magic. Anyway. She told me they used them to suss out power, if they were doing recruitment — or scoping out a rival, I guess. Maybe they still do — we dropped out of that scene ages ago.”

“Did she tell you how they work?” Quentin says.

“No — that whole crew was so big on secrecy,” Toni says with a sigh. “Honestly I think some of them liked being in a special club more than they liked magic. But it doesn’t matter — they’re locked to an individual’s magic signature.”

“Shit,” says Luisa. “Well. At least we’ll have the globe soon.”

Quentin drums fingers on the table, considering. “Can I see that?” Ray hands it over, and Quentin holds it, feeling it out. He can feel the magic pulsing in it — it’s an odd, thorny strand. “You’re a hundred percent sure we can’t use this?”

“Pretty much,” says Toni. “Apparently to make one you need to seal the spell with a pinprick of blood. Once it’s activated, the imprint can’t be transferred.”

“So it doesn’t matter,” Quentin says, “if I break it?”

“What are you thinking?” Luisa asks, intrigued.

He bites his lip, turning the compass over. “I’m not sure,” he confesses. “But — when I fixed the coffee maker the way I fixed it, it changed, and not just that but — it’s like it became more mine, right? I mean, when I use it, the magic it runs on, that’s my magic, playing one of my favorite songs. So — if this is a dead end for us anyway — I dunno, it seems worth a shot, right?”

“Definitely,” Luisa says. He can see her working through the notion. “Does the spell work on objects that have their own magic?”

Quentin shrugs, then smiles. “I guess we’ll find out.”

*

“And the Fingerlings have agreed to suspend their hostilities until we can sit down for peace talks,” says Eliot. “Fen gets a lot of credit here, honestly — she really managed to sweet-talk the iron breastplate off their warrior queen.”

“Nice,” says Quentin. He wasn’t sure if Eliot would call after how things went when they saw each other, but he’s — glad Eliot did. More or less.

“Josh is out there now doing cultural sensitivity recon for the menu. Hopefully whatever they’re into it’s more filling than Floating Mountain crew. Last time we hosted their ambassador I thought I was going to pass out. I had to sneak into the kitchen to scarf down a leftover scone.”

You were five seconds away from sucking my dick, Quentin thinks. You couldn’t make it an hour without crawling all over me. “Good luck with that."

“Thanks.” There’s a pause. Quentin feels like this should be easier after their undignified reunion, or else much worse. Instead it’s the same pleasant, slightly stilted chit-chat, only he keeps thinking, Did my teeth leave a mark where no one can see? Have you been looking at it when you undress alone? “That’s pretty much the Fillory rundown, I guess. What’s new with you?”

Quentin thinks: Less than a week ago you were grinding up against me and your cock was hard enough to cut glass and I liked every stupid second of it, and now you’re talking appetizers for state affairs. It doesn’t bother him, exactly; he just can’t square the two in his mind. It feels like one of them is from a parallel universe, but he doesn’t know which one. He says, “Not much.”

*

Penny blips into view on a sunny afternoon while Quentin’s sitting on the porch, taking notes on Labute’s theory of supplemental mendings.

“Oh,” Quentin says, surprised, “I’m still working through the last set — does Alice need the books back?”

Penny shakes his head. “Nope — I’m here on personal business.”

Quentin peers at him. He looks — different. He’s bouncing lightly from foot to foot, radiating — excitement? “What’s up? Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fucking great.” Penny breaks into a blinding grin. “Our dumb asses are getting married.”

He holds out a cream-colored card and Quentin takes it, bewildered. Looping teal script — Julia was involved in this, Quentin just knows — cordially invites him to celebrate the union of Penny Adiyodi and Kady Orloff-DIaz at the end of the month, which seems kind of fast until Quentin thinks about all the things they’ve had to wait for. A smile opens up on his face. “Holy shit, dude, congratulations.”

“Thanks, man.” Penny’s still grinning like the fucking sun, so joyful it kind of makes Quentin’s heart ache. He looks like someone who’s never been hurt.

Quentin studies the invitation. “Scarsdale?”

“Frankie did a favor for some super-old lady who was some big name in crystal shit,” Penny says. “Apparently her whole family pissed her off before she died, because she left him her big-ass house. He said we could use it.”

“Nice,” Quentin says.

“It’s gonna be chill, though,” says Penny. “Basically just an excuse to hang with all our friends. We were gonna do email invites, but Julia insisted — used some spell, did them all in like a day.”

There it is. “That tracks.”

Penny glances down at the floor for a second before saying, “We’d, uh — we’d really like it if you could come. Both of us.”

“Yeah, of course,” Quentin says, moved even as a part of him can’t believe it feels so obvious that he’d go to Penny’s — _wedding_ , what the fuck? He takes a glance at his reading, marks the page in his notes, and shuts the book. “Can I, like — buy you a drink or something?” That’s a thing, right? People do that?

Penny cocks an eyebrow at his materials. “You’re not busy?”

Quentin shrugs, stands up. “It can wait. I mean — you’re getting fucking married, man.”

Penny beams again, and — damn, Quentin really is unbelievably happy for him — for both of them. He did not see that one coming. “I really fucking am.”

*

Materials are done, results are done, procedure could probably use another read-through for clarity but he can’t look at it anymore so that’ll have to wait for now. Maybe he’ll ask Julia to do a read-through, if she wants a break from speed-planning a wedding. He’s spending his days immersed in mending theory, learning the granular details and driving ideas of this field he inherited and lost and has clawed his way back into. There’s a wistfulness in absorbing the details of these practices he can’t actually do anymore, but at the same time it’s kind of cool, taking the time to deepen his perspective this way, to connect the formal articulations of scholars to the instincts he’d just started refining, really, before it cut itself away.

Part of him feels like he’s hitting diminishing returns, though, since the central concepts are starting to feel familiar each time he encounters them and still he can’t quite bridge the gap he’s looking for, the distance between restoring what an object used to be and what he did, which is — not that, quite. Most of the altered-form mendings he’s found involve changes to the material composition, usually minor improvements in design to fortify the piece or increase efficiency — there’s an optometrist in Manhattan, for example, who shared his method for repairing broken glasses so that plastic frames become titanium, Illusioned to look the same as before. That’s neat, but — also not exactly what he’s looking for. You can buy titanium frames; you can’t buy what he made. He’s sort of proud of that, creating something that’s never existed, but — it’s hard to explain what makes him feel so sure that it’s a mended object, and not its own beast.

Prepping to plant a chipped-off piece of the compass needle provides a welcome change of pace. Quentin deliberates various potential adaptations for taking into account that it’s a magic object, but decides for this first round it’s probably best to keep the spell as it is and let the results guide him if need be. He can ask Josh if there’s anything he should change about how he’s been tending to the objects during growth.

Casting for it is _weird_ — when he reaches in he can feel immediately how the magic of brokenness and the object’s own magic are tangled together, and he’s not sure which to connect to. He tries to hold both of them, two strands together between his hands, as he asks — “What do you want, if it’s only you answering that question? If — if I promise you any answer is safe?” — and listens.

It’s — opinionated, and noisy; he’s getting strong feedback but nothing concrete, and he has the sense the dual magics are fighting it out, a bit, or offering up conflicting visions. He takes his time, tries to pacify them. “It’s okay,” he says, speaking gently. “You can — there’s room for all of it, okay? I’m going to make room.” He’s not a _thousand_ percent sure that’s true, but — he thinks he can. “I know it’s scary. I know. But — you can be want whatever you want, and um — I’ll do my best, okay?”

He sits with the magic a long time, and then a little longer, letting the magics make peace with each other, holding space for them to weave together and — pushing in, just a little, offering steady words or shaping his own output when he has the sense some direction is needed or some bind needs to be tied. It’s honestly kind of a thrill; he can’t remember ever having felt so in control of so much flow, rolling through his net strong and turbulent yet totally safe. He’s a better magician than he was, he realizes, discipline or no; he wouldn’t have been able to manage anything like this a year ago. It’s sort of nice, the way hooking up with Eliot and waking up okay about it was sort of nice: proof that something’s been changing, even when he couldn’t see.

By the time he closes the spell, night is falling dark and clear above him; he didn’t want to rush it. Some things need a lot of time. If anyone fucking knows that, it’s him.

*

“Koffler actually disagrees with Richards about the circumstantial adaptations for neo-Boylesian repairs,” Quentin says, “but he was a lot more concerned with retaining the structural integrity of the perimeter since his focus was primarily on applications to engineering. That doesn’t really apply to what most people are doing in those cases, so. It was an interesting read, though.”

“Cool,” says Eliot, which is an extremely polite response to Quentin lecturing at him for ten minutes about the minutiae of scholarly debates in the small objects subfield. He doesn’t know what else to talk about, though.

Silence; silence; silence. They used to have silences that didn’t feel like both of them were waiting for the other to remember his line, Quentin remembers. Back in Fillory, sure, but before that, too — at the cottage, evenings Quentin spent studying until his eyes crossed while Eliot blew off an assignment to perfect the lighting spell he wanted to try for the costume party they were having that weekend. Even then it had felt nice, to be allowed to witness Eliot when he was slightly less _on_. To feel like he’d found someone around whom he could just — be.

It doesn’t hurt, exactly, but it feels — weird, and maybe a little sad, to remember that now. That version of who they were to each other seems so far away.

“Oh!” Eliot says. Quentin wonders if he’s relieved to have thought of another safe topic. “Are you coming tomorrow night?”

Tomorrow night is an engagement party at the penthouse. Quentin had said yes happily when Penny brought it up before ordering them another round. He hadn’t done the math yet on who else would be attending. “Yeah,” he says brightly. “You’ll be there?”

“I will.”

Quentin imagines it: seeing Eliot in the penthouse, finley dressed in a scene of convivial celebration. He’s not nervous, but he thinks: when we were alone you pounced on me like you tear me limb from limb but in a hot way. I saw your chest hair for the first time in over a year and I almost blew my load right there. I wanted to suck on your fingers until you moaned. He thinks this distantly, sort of the way he used to lose afternoons contemplating the heat death of the universe. An unfortunate inevitability with no urgency behind it. Quentin should probably try to do something about that, right? Like, he doesn’t want to hook up with Eliot, but he’s not sure he’s figured out yet how to convince his dick that that’s true. “Cool,” he says. “I bet it’ll be fun.”

*

Julia told Quentin to be ready to go on Saturday afternoon, New York time, so they could get lunch and, he assumes, so she can rope him into setting up for the party, which he doesn’t mind. It’ll be nice to have something to do that’s not plugging away at his draft. Penny drops him off in front of a trendy little American bistro where she’s already waiting, hugging him tight before ushering him inside. It hasn’t even been that long but it’s still so good to see her. Quentin likes living in California honestly more than he ever thought he would, but it’ll always be weird, having her three thousand miles away.

“Hey,” Quentin says after the waiter takes their order, “can I talk to you about tonight?”

“Funny,” Julia says with playful suspicion, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Yes, I’ll hang the streamers or whatever, obviously.”

“Garlands,” she says, “but — awesome, thanks.” She gives him a yearbook-photo grin and bats her eyelashes. “What’s your thing?”

“So —” Quentin weighs various options for expressing his dilemma. It’s probably best to just get to the point. “I’m going to try to hook up with Eliot tonight.”

Julia’s face does that thing where her eyes go very big and her mouth goes very small, brows levitating towards the ceiling. “Okay,” she says slowly, trying and failing to sound nonjudgmental, “but are you — like, do you think that’s a good idea, Q?”

“See, and this is why we’re talking,” he says, “because — no. No, it’s a terrible idea. We’re on the same page here, you and me.”

“Uh huh,” she says. “And yet…”

“It’s a terrible idea,” he goes on, “but — look, I’m not proud, but — it happened when he came to San Diego, and tonight we’ll be drinking champagne and it’s going to be this lovey-dovey sentimental vibe —”

“Okay this _is_ Penny and Kady we’re talking about,” Julia says, “like yes they’re letting me have fun with it, but no one’s getting heart-shaped party favors.”

“— sure, but he’s probably going to use it as an excuse to wear a fucking suit or something,” Quentin says, “because it’s a special occasion, and, sorry, I haven’t gotten laid in like forever, and — the simple reality is, I can’t be trusted, Jules. It’s unfortunate, but it is what it is. So that’s where _you_ come in.” He takes a deep breath. “I need you to stop me.”

Julia furrows her brow. “From hooking up with Eliot?”

“Yes,” he says. “I need you to be my like, sexual designated driver. Because I’m going to make a terrible decision, so I need to know that when the time comes, you will take the wheel and save me from myself. By any means necessary.”

“By any means necessary,” she repeats. She tilts her head for a moment, then her mouth quirks into a smile. “Alright. I guess I can do that, for my oldest and best friend.”

“You’re a lifesaver,” he says. “I owe you one.”

She waves this off. “Let’s say this one’s on me.”

*

Walking into penthouse gives him an unexpected shock, which — planning around the Eliot situation had distracted him from the reality that the last time he was here, he was a fucking mess. For just a second it’s like he can see the guy who hadn’t left the city yet, hunched over on the giant sectional at two in the afternoon, unwashed hair falling over his face, pretending not to notice the rat’s nest of beer cans gathering on the end table next to him. Jesus. Everyone had watched that happen, and watched him bite any fucking hand that tried to lift him out of the hole he was digging himself into or even slow his descent. It’s amazing they hadn’t kicked him out of the apartment, to say nothing of welcoming back.

“You okay?” Julia says softly at his side.

Quentin shakes himself. That was — a long time ago. “Yeah. Just — been a while, is all.” He gives her a smile. “So. I heard a rumor about some garlands?”

There’s not that many garlands, actually, and Julia points him to a quick spell to get the placements even that makes quick work of it — “It’s like the fucking picture-leveling spell,” she says, endearingly irritated, “baby magic but whenever I do it I fuck it up three times for every one I get right” — so he winds up getting shunted over to kitchen duty, which mostly consists of placing snacks on trays in the arrangements Josh decides.

Josh greets him with a “Q-money!” and a — fistbump? Sure. “Great to see you, man. You look good.” He places a hand on Quentin’s shoulder and looks him in the eye. Very earnestly he says, “Like, really good. I’m glad.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says, about ready to crawl out of his skin at the idea that he spent six months living here while Josh worried about his fucking substance use. “What am I working on?”

Josh steers him to a pan of spinach puffs which Quentin begins setting in a round scalloped tray while Josh returns to doing… something… at the stove. “So how’s life in — it’s San Diego, right?”

“Mm-hmm,” Quentin says, doing some rough estimates to figure out the spacing. “It’s pretty good.”

“I went to San Diego once — spring break, senior year,” says Josh. “Me and my Wesleyan friends rented a house there to celebrate, and _man_ — that was a trip, in every meaning of the word. I may as well have been A. R. Rahman’s multilingual banger and 2008 Oscar winner for Best Song, because you could call me J- _ho_.”

Quentin blinks. “What?”

“Jai Ho?” says Josh. “The _Slumdog_ song? There was an English version with that chick from the Pussycat Dolls? Great song, you should check it out if you don’t know it.”

“Uh huh,” Quentin says. “But — aren’t you always, uh, J-ho? Because your last name is Hoberman?”

“Well, yeah,” Josh says agreeably. “But those two weeks, I _earned_ it.”

“Sure,” Quentin says, deciding to set that aside. Then, remembering, he says, “Oh — I was going to call you, actually — is there anything about Natural magic on plants that themselves have magical properties that you think might apply to inanimate cultivation?”

“Huh,” says Josh, doing… something at the stove. “There might be — usually when you're dealing with shit that channels or produces on its own, it’s actually the harvesting where that’ll make the biggest impact. Sometimes you sort of have to — close it up, before you can take it, or it won’t survive. Why do you ask?”

“Something new I’m trying — a magic sensor that was signature-locked, seeing if I can unlock it by putting it through the spell. I’ve been doing the usual tending but I wasn’t sure if there were any extra guidelines I should be following.”

“That’s awesome,” Josh says. “Yeah, let me think it over a bit and I’ll get back to you with some suggestions.”

“Thanks, man.” Quentin puts the spinach puff in the center of the tray. “What next?”

Penny and Kady walk through the front door while he’s setting up a tiered centerpiece with miniature cupcakes and Quentin pauses what he’s doing to greet them. To Kady he says, “Hey, I haven’t had a chance to say it in person — congratulations. I’m really happy for you guys.”

Kady scoffs. “This is his fault. I think marriage is idiotic. But —” She rolls her eyes. “Love involves compromise or whatever, so if it makes him happy…” There’s a smile playing around her lips, though, like she doesn’t mind having been talked into it. “I’m gonna go shower before people start showing up.” She gives Penny a quick kiss on the cheek and walks off.

Penny watches her go, smiling adoringly. “That’s my girl.”

“She really is.” Quentin can’t decide what’s more nuts: how besotted Penny is, or the fact that Penny has been in love with Kady basically the entire time Quentin has known him and somehow it feels like Quentin is only just now seeing the two of them as something other than a club that exists solely to remind him he can’t join it. Where the fuck was his head? “You were right,” he says abruptly.

Penny raises an eyebrow. “About what?”

Quentin shrugs, uncomfortable. He didn’t think through before saying it; it just seemed so fucking true, suddenly. “When you said I was — lucky, or whatever. I —” He swallows, remembering that night in the hotel room. He’d been so far into a place he still flinches to look at. “There’s a lot I — kind of suck at seeing. I mean —” Quentin breathes a laugh. “Fuck, you kind of — saved my ass last year, like, um, like maybe kind of my life actually, and I was just an asshole about it, the whole time, so, uh — sorry about that, and, you know. Thanks.”

Penny ducks his eyes, shifts his weight. He’s obviously not enjoying this any more than Quentin is. For really the first time Quentin finds himself wondering if there’s something here they have in common. “I’m glad you’re still around.”

Quentin nods. His throat goes a little tight. “Me too, actually.”

*

The penthouse fills up quickly once people start to arrive. Quentin gives Alice an easy hug when she walks in and sips wine talking with her and Diane about life at the New Library, starting with some updates on their planning and veering quickly into workplace gossip and petty coworker complaints. Alice is clearly comfortable around Diane in a way she — isn’t, around most people, and it makes him glad to see. Laughing with her at Diane’s spirited impression of a fellow Traveler who always talks a little too much in staff meetings, he has a weird sense of double vision, their past selves crashing into each other at Brakebills overlaid on the scene: her brittle hostility, his desperate fear. It’s so strange to think of the two of them meeting as fucked up kids, so tied up with their own unhappiness they probably couldn’t have imagined this: all the years of coming together and falling apart, eventually bringing them to something as simple as a night in New York, eating hors d’oeuvres and laughing as friends. Strange, and nice.

It’s crowded enough and Quentin’s having a good enough time that he doesn’t even notice whenever it is Eliot and Margo make their way through the clock; the first inkling he has that they’ve arrived is getting wrapped up in a very enthusiastic hug that turns out to be from Fen, wearing an outfit that looks sort of like a twelve-year-old's idea of what a very fancy lady might wear to a business meeting.

“Quentin,” she’s saying into his ear, “how _wonderful_ you’re here, you haven’t been to Whitespire in ages!”

“Fen, hey — yeah, it’s been busy,” he says, disentangling himself. “It’s good to see you, though. Is El — everyone else here, too?” Smooth, Coldwater.

Brightly Fen says, “Yes, Margo is —” She looks around, frowning. “I don’t know where.” She leans in and whispers conspiratorially, “I’ve had some Earth wine. Ember’s horns, why is it so good here?”

“I think it’s the grapes,” he says. “Maybe you should have some Earth water, for a bit.” He reaches an arm around her tilting shoulders, steering her gently towards the fridge while she giggles and acquiesces to be led. His stomach is doing jumping jacks while his eyes scan the room for Eliot’s curls, floating above the crowd, but it’s not — that’s fine. He’s helping out one friend, and he’s looking for another, and —

“There you are,” says a voice, and the personal trainer in his internal organs kicks it up a notch. “I was worried you’d gotten lost on the way to the bathroom again.”

“It’s _such_ a large dwelling,” Fen says in tones of distress. Then she smiles. “Quentin is helping me. Did you know that he’s very helpful?”

Eliot’s warm eyes meet Quentin’s, mouth suppressing amusement. He’s wearing a dark suit and his hair is curling elegantly around his face. Quentin’s guts are up to burpees by now. “I’d heard rumors to that effect.”

“Hey El,” Quentin says. “Just trying to keep our friend hydrated.”

“Your efforts are appreciated — oh, and there she goes,” Eliot says, watching as Fen totters off distracted by the sight of — Todd? Todd is getting invited to things now? Quentin’s missed a lot. “She’ll be okay.” He smiles. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” Quentin says. He ignores the zumba class happening in his abdomen. He’s not — like he actually literally is not nervous, is the thing. He’s just — trying not to think about how badly his dick wants to fuck his incredibly hot ex-boyfriend he’s trying to be friends with who’s now standing two feet in front of him and who on some level definitely wants to fuck him too. It’s not an ideal state of affairs, but it’s not _nervous_. He’s not sure what it is. Maybe there’s a long German word for it. “What’s up?”

“Not much.” Eliot’s eyes drop for a second as he takes a sip from his red cup. “So, um — sorry in advance if this is awkward, but given how things went last time, I thought maybe I should just — clear the air, up front, about the fact that — we shouldn’t have sex tonight.”

Quentin thinks: You mean, when you stuck your tongue so far down my throat I nearly asphyxiated? Out loud he says, “Wow, presumptuous much?”

Eliot cringes. “Sorry — I just thought —”

“No,” Quentin says, “I’m sorry — you, uh. You thought right, probably.” He wonders if Eliot talked about this with his therapist. “I actually asked Julia to run interference,” he admits. “Just in case. She’s probably been trailing you since she showed up.”

“Ah, so that explains the feeling I was being watched,” says Eliot, arching a brow.

“I should probably go check in with her,” Quentin says, relieved for an excuse, “just to set her mind at ease. I’ll see you around?”

Eliot holds up his cup in a gesture of cheers. So that’s — fine. Interaction done, situation almost normal, sex off the table, probably. Frankly, that counts as a success.

Quentin does find Julia, who snuggles up to him tipsy and affectionate before introducing him to some people she’s met through Kady’s hedge network. The evening stretches on, bubbling and golden like champagne, unspooling in debates about outreach strategies and arguments about the best _Die Hard_ sequel and talking shit about jobs and grad school and exes. Quentin drifts through the room from conversation to conversation, friend to stranger to friend, downing some admittedly incredible spinach puffs and a raspberry-vanilla cupcake or two, and feels loose and light and so normal he can’t believe it. Lucky. Todd is apparently working at a start-up, which — good for him; Margo kisses Quentin on the cheek and tells him she might be asking a favor soon. At one point he’s shocked and thrilled to discover himself talking with a pretty friend of Kady’s about Lars von Trier movies, and he thinks it’s probably a little tacky to pick someone up at an engagement party even if both your exes aren’t also there, but it’s — fun, kind of, to think that he — could. Without any of, like — just by standing here chatting about _Dancer in the Dark_. Speaking of things he couldn’t imagine six years ago.

He’s lost track of the girl and is trying to find Julia, although he can’t quite remember why; she’s not in the kitchen or with Kady, and he’s having trouble spotting her in the crowd. He edges along the walls, set on the muddled notion that this will help him stay organized in his search, when —

“Oh, hey again.”

Eliot: outfit no less impeccable, hair just a little more out of place. Smiling, friendly, but — are his eyes just a shade too dark? Is it just — it’s the lighting, he thinks, or his imagination.

Quentin — should smile back, should strike up a conversation, should ask him if he knows where Julia is. But he’s kinda drunk and the music is loud, Matty Healy angsting _she's got a boyfriend anyway — she's got a boyfriend anyway_ — and it’s like a switch flips, like the rational adult in him is violently ejected from the premises and suddenly all he can think of is everything Eliot could do to him. He can hear his own heartbeat beneath it because his body knows that Eliot’s body is close, Eliot’s skin is here to be touched and he knows Eliot’s body knows it too —

“El,” he says, frankly staring, voice rough.

Eliot hears what he wants, without needing to be told; he’s always been good at that. Quentin can see it in his face: the moment of recognition, the possibilities sinking into his mind, the way his lips hang parted for a second before he can speak. “Quentin —”

Quentin closes the distance between them; rests one hand on Eliot’s arm, above the wrist, softly, just a statement of intent.

Eliot looks wonderingly into his eyes, like he’s not sure whether to trust what he’s seeing. “Are you —”

“I am,” Quentin says. He moves his fingertips back and forth on Eliot’s arm.

Eliot swallows; steps back minutely. Quentin drops his arm. He should be chastened by this, but the part of his brain in charge of that is not presently operational.

“We — shouldn’t,” says Eliot.

Quentin nods. “Right,” he says. They shouldn’t. They agreed. Which, like — “But… why?” Eliot gives him a curious look and Quentin goes on, “Like, we shouldn’t, absolutely, that’s correct.” He ignores the rush of heat saying this out loud sends through his middle. “And like, I know there was a _reason_ , but I’m just, I’m having trouble remembering it. So — if you could just — remind me _why_ we shouldn’t — that would be… helpful.”

“Oh,” says Eliot, uncertain. “Well — because we’re, like, adults, and adults don’t just go around — hooking up with their exes at the drop of a hat.” That seems probably true. “And — and because it’s not good for us.”

“Right,” Quentin says. He takes a sip of his wine. “And it’s not good for us because...”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Eliot says in exasperation, “but the last time you had sex with me, Quentin, you had a nervous breakdown.”

Oh yeah. That. “Sure,” Quentin agrees. He sure wishes he could have this conversation while picturing anything but Eliot bending him over a table and fucking him into a coma. “To be fair, though, I kinda feel like that was a long time coming. Like, yes, the sex was catalyst, kind of, but honestly if it hadn’t been it probably would have been something else sooner or later. No offense.”

“None taken,” Eliot says dryly.

“And right now I’m doing great,” he continues. “I mean, we hooked up two weeks ago, and, you know. I kept right on ticking.”

Eliot lifts his eyebrows encouragingly. “That’s — good.”

“I’m just saying,” says Quentin, “you know — in general, right, we should — not. Because we’re —”

“Adults,” Eliot supplies.

“Adults,” Quentin echoes. “And we should have, like, boundaries, and dignity, and make good choices, and all that. But — if it’s this one night, that’s kind of a special occasion, and we’re both — thinking it, already, then…”

Warningly: “Quentin…”

“Then just — you know, don’t stop yourself on _my_ account,” he says. “Because I’m — fine, so. No need to worry about me.” He takes another drink. “Now — if you don’t _want_ to —”

Pleadingly: “Quentin…”

“— then that’s a different thing,” he finishes. “And, obviously, I respect that completely. Because, like, consent, and all. So. I just wanted to get that clear.”

There’s a silence. Quentin feels feverish to a degree that has him worried he’s about to get an erection in public for the first time since he was sixteen. Eliot is looking at him like he’s sprouted tentacles from his nostrils and they’re holding protest signs reading MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. “Is this your version of trying to seduce me?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says lightly, scanning the crowd, “are you going to fuck me?” He gestures towards the middle of the room. “Julia’s talking to Alice, they’re probably way down a theory rabbit hole. If there’s a time for me to make a getaway…”

Eliot curses under his breath. “You go left, I go right. Make sure we don’t meet on the stairs, it’s too obvious.”

“Same room as before?” Quentin asks. Eliot nods, then sidles off. Quentin splits in the opposite direction, trying to look nonchalant. He darts a quick glance at Julia to make sure she’s not looking before he heads up the stairs, at which point his resolve fails and he nearly fucking trips over his shoelaces rushing to Eliot’s room where Eliot is already waiting.

They kiss like a fucking natural disaster, inevitable and overwhelming, hot on each other’s mouths, moving like they’re hungry for something they can’t get anywhere else. Quentin grabs at Eliot’s body like he’s trying to climb him, or crawl inside him, or — _fuck_ , Eliot’s got his shoulders in his giant hands and Quentin feels like they could crush his bones to a pulp and it feels so _good_ , he’s so fucking eager for it.

They collapse onto the bed and this time it’s Quentin straddling Eliot, too turned on to be sorry about it, wild for the sight of Eliot’s wanting face beneath him and his hands cupping Quentin’s ass and his hard-on growing quick and huge beneath him while Quentin rocks against the heat. He bites at Eliot’s neck and does it again when Eliot cries out loud and he traces lines up and down Eliot’s sides with his nails under Eliot’s shirt, pausing before he leans back down to kiss Eliot again because Eliot is staring at him in foggy amazement saying “Fuck, Q, fuck —” and Quentin wants to drink that down like wine.

“I wanna suck your dick,” Quentin says, the desire for it overwhelming him out of nowhere. Eliot’s hips buck up while his eyes bug out, which is one of those things that’s so unsexy it’s insanely hot. Quentin grips at the tops of Eliot’s thighs. “Can I? Please?” He knows he doesn’t need the _please_ , but he also knows Eliot fucking loves that shit, so —

Eliot moans like he can’t even make words right now, then pulls it together enough to say, “Yeah — Jesus, _yeah_ , whatever you fucking want —”

Quentin doesn’t need to be told fucking twice. He backs up for a better angle, fiddling with Eliot’s fucking leather belt, brain screaming at the proximity to his cock thick with arousal. “It’s kinda weird that Julia just fell down on the job like that,” he says while he’s tugging at the two-pronged buckle — why the hell did Eliot wear this thing? “I almost wonder if I should be worried about her.”

“It’s probably all the wedding stuff,” says Eliot, breathless, eyes on Quentin’s hands, “she’s just distracted.”

Quentin finally slides the belt loose, whips it out and drops it with a clunk to the side. “Julia doesn’t really get distracted.”

Eliot reaches out a hand for the back of Quentin’s head. “But you do, right?” He fists _hard_ , a shock that travels down Quentin’s entire body, chest doubling over at how fucking hot that is. “Jesus,” he groans, “yeah —” Hastily he brings his hands to the button of Eliot’s dark pants, mouth already open in anticipation. And then —

“Oh what the _hell_ —”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ — _goddammit, Julia_ —”

Quentin is, like, _embalmed_ , head to toe covered, with — there’s really no better word for it — goo. White, sticky, thick goo, all over every centimeter of him. Like he fell into a vat of Jell-O, or just fucking pupated from an alien chrysalis. It smells like artificial cherry.

Eliot is completely unscathed; even the parts of him still touching Quentin’s thighs don’t pick up on the stuff. Flawless spell work, Quentin notes, gritting his teeth.

“I guess she didn’t fall down on the job,” Eliot says, laughter bubbling up onto his face.

Quentin sighs. “I guess not.”

Their aborted tryst is over after that; they don’t really need to talk about it. Quentin makes his undignified way downstairs, pausing at the staircase until he spies Julia, in a corner talking to Twenty-Three.

He walks over to her, trying to ignore the stares. “Okay, Jules, what the fuck.”

“Oh hey, Q,” she says with a grin. “Enjoying the party? The garlands look great.”

Twenty-Three looks him up and down and cackles. “The fuck happened to you? You look like you had an industrial accident at the sperm donation clinic.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” says Quentin. To Julia he says, “Seriously? This was your plan?”

“What’s a little classic hedge-hex between friends?” she says, batting her eyelashes.

He glares at her. “Very mature.”

Twenty-Three says, “You look Casper the friendly ghost got into a fight with a used condom and lost.” Quentin ignores him.

Julia puts a hand on her hip. “Okay. Did you or did you not ask me to baby-sit your dick for the duration of my dear friends’ engagement party, which I also planned?”

Quentin inhales through his nose. He is never going to eat cherry candy again. “I did.”

“And,” Julia says, “did you or did you not say, quote, that I should accomplish this task _by any means necessary_?”

He clenches his jaw. “I did.”

“Furthermore, and finally,” she says, “have you or have you not known me more than twenty of your twenty-seven years of existence, which is long enough to know that if you need something done _right_ , you come to me, and if you need it done _nicely_ , you can fucking find somebody else?”

Quentin crosses his arms. “I have.”

“So,” she says brightly, “I think what you actually meant to say was, _Thank you, Julia, for protecting me from the consequences of my terrible judgment_.”

“Thank you Julia for protecting me from the consequences of my terrible judgment,” he mutters. “And _please_ tell me there’s a counterspell.”

“Please tell me there’s not,” says Twenty-Three. “You look like a melting ice sculpture of a dildo.” God. One Penny has really been enough for Quentin to learn to live with.

Julia reaches into her jeans pocket and hands him a breath mint. “Go suck on this while alternating Popper Three and Valderrama’s Starter and looking in a mirror. It’ll dematerialize by the time you’re done. Oh, and don’t bite it — it’s okay if it breaks on your tongue, but if you chew you’ll have to start over, and I only brought one.”

Quentin takes it, sullen, and stalks off to the bathroom to fix the situation. He’ll be appreciative of her efforts at some point, probably. But he needs to get this shit out of his hair first.

*

So Be Normal Around Eliot Round Two was a disaster, but — begrudging credit where it’s due — Julia’s assault on his dignity might have been the best way to address the problem after all. Something about the memory of their aborted hook-up ending in _such_ an ignominious way leeches some of the potency out of the entire concept, like a psychological cold shower, or developing a permanent aversion to pulled pork after an unfortunate bout of food poisoning. It’s his body that hasn’t gotten the message about where things stand; maybe dousing it in gunk, and not in the fun way, was what he needed for reality to start sinking in. Operant conditioning, or whatever.

Either way, he has other things to worry about. He has an article to write, or at least a blinking cursor to stare at while he fights off sudden urges to try to track down the names of action cartoons he vaguely remembers watching as a child. He’s still stuck on the fact that he set out working towards a mended object and what he achieved was not exactly that; he can’t reconcile the fact that he sort of failed with the feeling that he wildly succeeded, and every time he tries to start writing leaning in one direction, his doubts start shouting him down from the other side. He keeps trying, though — every morning a new handful of lines typed out and then deleted in dismay. On the bright side, by the time he gives up on using his brain for the day, he’s actually kind of looking forward to running. The enthusiasm fades once he actually starts running, but it’s nice while it lasts. Quentin’s not really in a place to discount that. He’s in the tail end of the new plan, week 7 going three full miles, and halfway through he’s startled to realize that there’s no real doubt he’ll finish it, anymore; somehow it’s gone from this impossible distance to something he knows his body can do, if he just makes up his mind.

*

Luisa’s back at work, but they still host another spellshare, this one focused on protective magic — psychic shields, deflection charms, certain types of scanners, and so on. Quentin’s able to chime in this time with a couple of the wards they inherited from Marina-23 back when they first set up shop in the penthouse; the spells had been a pain to reverse engineer, but they’re solid and useful. It’s more fun than he would have expected, gathering a little circle around him and talking them through the tuts, offering models and critiques, nudging someone’s thumb into the proper angle; there’s an appealing puzzle-like aspect to honing in on exactly where someone’s casting is falling short, and a deep thrill of satisfaction when he watches it click.

The stars of the event, though, are Ray and Toni. It turns out they know a _ton_ of shit — spells to identify whether food’s been tampered with, check for common hedge traps behind a door, cast flexible illusions that discourage attention and questions. They’re unmistakably hedge spells, tuts strung together in unconventional sequences with a constant thread of stylistic flexibility Quentin’s learned to associate with SoCal castings. He had thought he was pretty set on ways to protect himself, but he picks up a bunch of things it feels good to have in his back pocket, even as he hopes the part of his life where he’d have cause to use them is over.

“Where did you guys learn all that?” he asks them later, when the guests are gone and the rest of them are cleaning up. “I mean, I spent a couple years trying to protect me and my friends with magic, and most of that was new to me.”

“Yeah,” says Nico, “I think of myself as pretty paranoid, and I didn’t know half that shit.”

“Oh — back when we first kind of fell into the scene,” says Toni. “We had this friend —”

“— Donovan,” Ray says with a laugh. “He was kind of nuts — last I heard he’d gone full doomsday prepper — but he knew his shit, about keeping yourself safe.” To Toni he says, mimicking a thick Boston accent, “Rule number one: a house is only as safe as its wards. Rule number two —”

Toni responds in kind. “A hedge is only as safe as his house.” The two of them share a laugh. “He had a point. If you were running in those circles, any week there was a fifty-fifty chance you’d get caught up in some rivalry or turf war.” She rolls her eyes.

“It was a crowd that drew a lot of assholes looking for a power trip,” says Ray. “People had figured out ways to compensate.”

“See,” says Luisa, stacking compostable cups on an end table, “this is the kind of thing I’ve been thinking, like — hedges have this entire body of knowledge, and that’s not even getting into people who functionally are hedges but don’t identify that way. Like with that compass, you guys knew what it was instantly and we had no idea. But this stuff gets lost, because it doesn’t get written down, or it’s wrapped up in all this secrecy — I feel like there has to be a way to preserve that. Spellshares are a start, but they’re limited to whoever shows up that day, you know?”

“Could you write it down, somehow?” asks Quentin, trying to picture what that might looks like.

Luisa shrugs. “Where, though? I don’t want to write, like, a book of hedge magic, according to me. I don’t have the time, first of all, and also — I don’t know, it’s like, a book is static. It would be whatever I managed to compile, or whoever managed to compile, by some arbitrary end date, instead of like — what I wish we had was some way for that knowledge to accumulate, without dissipating based on who’s there at any given point.”

“Right,” says Quentin, thinking out loud, “something dynamic, that people can access but that doesn’t necessarily have a final form.”

“And something that’s not just by one person,” says Luisa. “Because it’s not just one person’s expertise, and we’d want to represent that.”

“So you’d want people to be able to contribute,” says Quentin.

“But at the same time,” says Cynthia, “wouldn’t you want some kind of vetting process?”

“To make sure everything on it is legit,” Quentin says, “not to mention safe, right? So — you’d need like, a group of people committed to the idea enough to spend some time investigating, testing things out.”

“Sure,” says Luisa, “open access for magic users, but with some kind of oversight to make sure it’s actually useful.”

Nico steps between them and claps a hand on both their shoulders. “Congratulations. You two have just invented Wikipedia.”

Quentin and Luisa exchange glances, then laugh.

“Okay,” Luisa says, “you might have a point. How has no one done that, though?”

Nico shrugs. “Because magic is hard, and coding is hard, and almost no one is all that good at both?”

“Could you build something like that?” asks Quentin. Nico raises an eyebrow like he’s not even going to dignify that with a response. Quentin amends it to, “ _Would_ you build it?”

“Yeah, why not,” he says. “I mean, if you guys get me the content, I can definitely get it online.”

“Wait, seriously?” says Luisa, sounding excited now. “Guys, I think if we actually did this, it could be a really big deal. Right now internet resources are either things like FuzzBeat and — what’s her new one that just launched?”

“Lickhole,” Cynthia supplies.

“Places that release academic spells to the public,” says Luisa. “Which is great, but there’s gaps in what it’ll cover, and it’s hard for most people to crack if they haven’t been trained for it. And then everything else is like, sketchy-ass Google magic, which may or may not work, or may or may not singe your eyebrows off when you try it. A place that had outside magic you could trust — that could mean a lot for access.”

“How would we get the spells on there, though?” says Quentin, intrigued; her excitement is contagious.

“We can start with what we know. And then —” She shrugs. “Ask around? Talk to people we know, ask them about who _they_ know?”

“We’re still in touch with some of the crew from the old days,” Toni says. “They might remember things we don’t, or never knew.”

“And it’s not like we’re looking for some finalized product, right?” says Luisa. “This would be something that’s always in process, always growing and changing — it’s not like it would ever be _complete_. It would be work, and I don’t know how much time for it I’d have till fire season’s over, but — I dunno, I think it could be kind of fun, too, to really look for what’s out there.”

Quentin can’t help but smile; the way she’s describing it, it sounds so — big, and expansive, and yeah, fun, too. “I bet you’re right,” he says. “I bet it would be.”

*

“So _then_ Tick got all passive-aggressive with Rafe like, _I see the confusion, my understanding was that our priority on this committee was to secure the long-term fiscal stability of the country, apologies for having been mistaken_ , and I thought Margo was going to pop a vein,” Eliot says. “Luckily we were out of time by then, so everyone got a chance to cool off. And that’s… pretty much everything that happened at the council meeting yesterday.”

“Sounds rough,” says Quentin. “Glad you got through it.”

Silence; silence; silence. Quentin wonders if this is how it’s going to be between them, forever. He wonders why the only time things between them feel real is when they’re tearing off each other’s clothes. If all the sex and everything that came after burned up what they had been to each other before.

Eliot asks, “So what’s new with you?”

And it’s like — there are new things with him, actually. Aren’t there? He could say, _I’m trying to write this article and it’s driving me fucking crazy because I don’t know how to make someone else really see what it is that I did and when I think about it too long I wonder if I’m an idiot for trying_. Or he could say, _A bunch of my friends are all about getting magic to reach as many people as possible and I sort of thought I was tagging along with that just to kill time but now I might be kind of into it?_ Or he could say, like, _I ran three miles twice this week and it sucked ass both times but it also wasn’t like, hard_. That’s fucking new. They used to talk about — whatever, about the things happening inside their heads. He should be able to — but he can’t. Like he doesn’t know how to do that, if they’re not doing — everything else. Or like he doesn’t know how to be the person who jogs three miles, and also be Eliot’s friend.

He says, “We’ve been watching the Fast and Furious movies.”

“Oh yeah?” His brows arching; lifting a drink to his lips. Maybe not, these days. Maybe a cup of coffee. Or like, water. Quentin should probably drink more water. That seems like the kind of thing he could maybe start working on now that getting out of bed every day is more or less a given.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’re fun. Dumb, but, you know. Pretty entertaining. The action scenes are shot well.”

“Cool,” says Eliot.

Quentin wants to scream, but only for like, a second. That’s good, right? “Yeah. It’s pretty cool.”

*

He can tell right away that something is different, when he goes to harvest the compass; even before he really reaches to assess, it’s giving off something — crackling and unfinished and strong. Magic like an almost, or like the number nine. Cautiously he plugs in, just listening at first, trying to get a good enough read to pick the right closing spell from the suggestions Josh had told him about; it feels like — a garment with a missing stitch, or a circuit with a wire just a hair out of place.

Quentin starts working through one of the recommended tut sequences, the one Josh said was generally used for securing completeness, going slowly so he can keep his focus on the magic beneath his hands to see how it’s responding. It’s — settling, he thinks; sewing itself up, or — he repeats the sequence again, then once more, feeling the magic tame itself, curl into something — usable? He thinks so. He thinks he can feel — the wholeness, there, and beneath it a sense of — purpose, maybe.

He begins to dig.

The compass is — a compass, still, or again. The shape of the arrow looks different; it reminds him of the hand of an old-fashioned clock, he thinks, like the Chatwins’ clock, or the one at Grand Central. And the base is no longer white but softly metallic, almost bronze. There’s more than a little Philip Pullman in it, he notices wryly with a thought for the school librarian who’d pointed him in that direction after his fourth or fifth go-round on Fillory. Strangest is that it’s glowing — not like a flashlight, but like a lantern, or a candle, something soft and flickering and organic. The arrow is twitching, in time with the light.

So — okay. He fixed (made?) a compass that at some point in its history could detect magic, for some undefined values of both “detect” and “magic,” and which may or may not do the same thing now, if he can figure out how it works or how to read it, which could be tricky given that it didn’t come with an instruction manual. That’s… not super helpful.

Quentin brushes the dirt off and sticks it in his pocket, a puzzle for the future. He can poke at it once the article is written, maybe.

*

By the end of the week, with five days left till the submission deadline, he’s written maybe five hundred words, which would be more impressive if it weren’t really the same handful of sentences typed and deleted a dozen times. He tries to put it out of his mind when Twenty-Three picks him up in the afternoon; he has a wedding to go to, one he’s actually glad to to be attending, which is not something he ever thought he’d feel about any wedding, much less Penny’s. Writer’s block will have to wait. Possibly for a different publication.

At the penthouse Julia, god bless her, has already dug through the clothes he left here for his one decent suit. Quentin finds an unused room to change in while she pretends she’s not stressed as she redoes her eye make-up a thousand times, a habit he remembers from Model UN conferences. It makes him smile to think: everything that’s happened since, and still there his best friend is. When he’s dressed he searches through the halls — god, this place feels even bigger than he remembered in the light of day — until he finds a mirror someone hung upstairs by the staircase.

That’s where he is fifteen minutes later, staring at a diagram on his phone trying to remember how to tie a fucking tie, when, because the universe has elected to dick him over personally, a door opens down the hall and Eliot slips out, smiling when he spots him. “Oh — hey, Q.”

In as neutral a voice as he can manage on the occasion of having been thrust into sober solitude with the ex he sure is trying to Be Normal about for the first time in over a year, Quentin says, “Eliot. Hi.”

Eliot looks, obviously, just nightmarishly good in a goddamn tuxedo, the one menswear item even Quentin is programmed to find unreasonably attractive. Quentin does his best to ignore this, keeping his eyes on his neck in the mirror. Should he have put his hair up? Whatever. He can reconsider that if he ever gets this thing to stay around his neck looking decent. Eliot’s reflection behind him has a small frozen smile. Beneath that, though, Quentin knows — he knew Eliot for fifty years, he doesn’t need to be told — that Eliot is, like, _vibrating_ behind him at the thought of — the knot collapses in on itself again. Quentin sighs; takes a moment to debate the wisdom of what he’s about to say. “This is like, killing you, isn’t it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Rolling his eyes, Quentin turns around, offering Eliot the tie. “Go ahead.”

Eliot eyes him uncertainly. “Are you sure?”

Quentin wants to say: Why, would that be _completely fucking weird_? Would tying your ex-boyfriend’s tie be more or less weird than trying to fuck your ex-boyfriend after you told your ex-boyfriend you weren’t going to fuck him? More or less weird than barely being able to have a conversation with someone you fucked for fifty years? More or less weird than standing next to someone you’ve known in just about every way it’s possible for one human being to know another and not knowing what to say after _Oh, hey_?

He shrugs. “Yeah, why not? It’s gonna take me forever, so.”

Eliot steps forward to take the tie, holds it for a second like he thinks Quentin might be kidding; then he loops it around Quentin’s neck and gets to work. Quentin tries not to respond to Eliot’s hands at his neck, the heat of his body so close to his. “You know, there are spells for this.”

“I can’t do any of them,” says Quentin, fidgeting with his sleeves. “My magic’s fucked, remember?”

“Oh.” Eliot looks sorry, although Quentin doesn’t really mind. He can’t remember what he actually told Eliot about his magic, if he explained that it was all kinetic magic and not just repairs. He doesn’t know if he said, My magic that was your magic, that’s gone now. I don’t know if it’s ever coming back.

“We’re not having sex tonight,” he says, because — he doesn’t know why. Because he has a disease in his brain maybe, or because his ex-boyfriend is tying his tie and Quentin is thinking _I’ve watched you cry and watched you come and watched you turn into the person you didn’t know you could be and I don’t know how the fuck we’re supposed to be normal about that ever_. Because he wants to be normal but for just a second he wants Eliot to feel as fucking weird about it as he does, more.

Eliot laughs. “Right. Of course.”

He says this so lightly, like the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. Like he wasn’t fucking there, last time or the time before that. It’s so annoying that Quentin can’t stop himself before saying, “Even though we’re both thinking about it.”

Eliot pauses, his fingers still just below Quentin’s throat. He doesn’t argue, though. “Because we are adults making good choices.” He gives Quentin’s tie a final adjustment before stepping back to admire his handiwork. Quentin tries to neutralize whatever the fuck is going on his head. “Voila. All done.”

Quentin gestures down the stairs, where people are gathering. “I think everyone’s getting ready to Travel out.”

“Don’t you want to check to see how it looks?” says Eliot.

Quentin’s mouth twists into — it’s not not a smile, he figures. He says, “I trust you.” Quentin doesn’t really know if he means it as a thanks or as a dagger. From the strained smile on Eliot’s face, he doesn’t know, either.

*

The house in Scarsdale is only technically a house; the word _mansion_ comes to mind, or maybe _estate_. Gleaming white columns at the front of an imposing facade, tall windows revealing rooms with high ceilings sprawling to either side. There are, like, _grounds_. Quentin wonders what the fuck this lady did or where the fuck she came from, to leave this behind. It’s Wicker-level money they’re dealing with here.

The back is set up for the reception, white folding chairs laid out in neat rows under a delicate white canopy held up by poles wrapped in blossoming garlands. There are maybe a hundred people there, more than Quentin would have expected. He thinks some faces look familiar from his travels with Julia and spares a moment to hope that only two people he has slept with will be present at this wedding. On their way to find seats an usher hands him a program printed on creamy paper. “How the fuck did Julia put this together in a month?” he marvels out loud.

Next to him, Alice smiles, looking amused. “I get the sense Penny’s been thinking about this a while. I think he might have spilled to her a while ago, and she decided to — make a couple bets, so to speak.”

“That is… insane,” he says, smiling. It’s a particularly Julia type of insanity.

Music starts to play, hushing the crowd — the Cure, Quentin notes with approval. _You make me feel like I am home again…_ There’s no aisle, but Penny and Kady walk from opposite sides to meet facing each other at the front. He’s in a simple tux; she’s in black pants and a studded leather jacket, her only concession to tradition a white lily tucked into her mass of black curls. They both look sheepish and excited and embarrassed and in love; it’s honestly really sweet.

Julia steps into place behind them, lovely in a lilac dress, tendrils of hair framing her face. After working a quick amplification spell she says, clear and loud through the space, “When I was talking with the happy couple about carrying out my duties as officiant, I was told by the groom to be, quote, ‘like, you know, sweet and all, but not embarrassing — just be cool,’ and by the bride that no one gives a shit about what anyone is saying when they’re waiting for an open bar.” Good-natured laughter ripples through the guests. “So in deference to their wishes, I’ll make this brief.”

“Honestly,” she says, “when I was thinking about what I wanted to say, I had some trouble getting started. Penny and Kady’s story is so sweet, and so epic, and so beautiful, that it kind of speaks for itself. From flirting at first sight to a love that literally outlasts death — I mean, come on, guys. Do you really need me here? What else is there even to say?” The crowd laughs again; Penny and Kady roll their eyes, smiling.

“But then I realized,” Julia goes on, “that I was thinking about it all wrong. In movies, you know, love is the end of the story — the moment where they finally confess their feelings, or he gets down on one knee, or she says yes. And that stuff’s nice, right? We’re definitely here to celebrate that Penny got down on one knee, and, despite thinking that marriage is for Republicans, Kady did say yes.” Julia takes a moment to look at them with a private smile before resuming her speech. “But this isn’t a movie. Life is so much weirder, and harder, and more complicated, and more exciting, and wilder, and _better_ than some story. And in life, love’s not the grand finale. It’s the beginning. It doesn’t wrap everything up; it makes things bigger. It doesn’t close the book; it writes new chapters.”

“So that’s what I wanted to say today, when we’re all together here in honor of Penny and Kady and their love.” Julia wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. “What they’ve done for that love — the way they’ve fought for each other, the obstacles they’ve overcome — is an incredible show of strength and devotion. After what they’ve made it through, I can’t think of anyone who needs marriage advice less. But what I really admire in them — what makes me feel so, so blessed to be able to call them friends — isn’t what they do _for_ love, but what they do _with_ it. How they’ve let it not just fill their hearts, but open them wider; how the strength of their bond has made them braver and bolder for everyone else lucky enough to know them. They remind me that love isn’t like a flower that blooms once and then fades; it’s a tree with deep roots, giving new fruit every spring. And even though we’re about to watch something romantic as hell go down, it’s not just about Penny and Kady; it’s about all of us, everyone who’s been touched by the fierceness of their hearts. Because love is like magic: it grows when it’s shared. And this might look like a happy ending, but the real joy is that it’s not an end at all. It’s a start.”

The three of them at the front share a misty look. Quentin is — glad, so glad that they’re Julia’s friends, and maybe even his. Julia clears her throat. “Okay. They’re not doing rings, but — it’s vows time, people. Get your tissues out.” She nods at Penny to begin.

“I’m gonna keep this real simple,” Penny says, eyes shining. “I had nothing, and then I had you. And I was so used to nothing, I fucked that second part up, real bad. But it’s because of you that I get to try and do it right this time. And it’s because of you that —” He breaks into a laugh. “Shit, I’m not even worried, you know? Because I know I’m not alone. What the fuck do I have to be scared of anymore?”

Alice is sniffling, to Quentin’s surprise. Maybe weddings up everyone's baseline sentimentality, because his own throat is tight, which — okay, like, this is extremely sweet, and he’s beyond thrilled for both of them, but everyone has to draw a fucking line, and this is his. Life has brought him low and humbled him severely, and he’s spent months dragging himself out of the wreckage from his own mess, but somewhere in him is a tiny kernel of pride. He is not going to _cry_ at _Penny Adiyodi’s_ wedding.

Kady starts, smirking, “So first of all, I just want to remind you that this was your idea.” Everyone laughs; Quentin appreciates this. “Second of all —” Her face crumples. “Oh, fuck me — you win the bet,” she chokes out, and digs a dollar bill out of the pocket of her leather jacket and hands it to Julia, who laughs through her tears. “Weddings are bullshit,” she says, voice thick, looking up at Penny’s face, “but loving you was the first thing in my life that wasn’t. I don’t wanna know where I’d be without that. I don’t wanna know _who_ I’d be without that. Because I’m kicking life’s ass right now, but every good thing about me, every _real_ thing about me — you saw it first, before I even knew it was there. You showed me who I could be, so, you know — going through this whole circus kinda seems like the least I could do.”

And — fuck, Quentin is crying at Penny Adiyodi’s wedding. Crying like a big dumb baby, tears streaming down his fucking cheeks, because — because love is so hard and so rare that it’s insane anyone finds love at all. Because Penny and Kady are two people life has fucked over to hell and back, and here they are so full of happiness they’re shining with it. Because Julia loves them, and he loves Julia, and Julia loves him too, and somehow with all the shit he’s fucked up he’s never been alone, and because he’s been so bad at remembering that, but he wants to be better. He wants to be better at listening to love when it speaks to him, and giving love without being afraid; he wants to be better at opening up his heart. He wants to be as brave as Penny and Kady are, who have remade themselves and their lives into something beautiful. He wants — a lot, Jesus, maybe Penny was on to something when he called Quentin high-maintenance, because right now he’s crying because he’s lucky and he’s crying because he wants more; he’s crying because he emptied out his life and filled it up again and if he reaches into his own heart he can see that somehow it’s still stretching outward to hold things he can’t yet touch and he’s scared to want them and scared he’ll shut them out. He’s crying because he had a love that was gorgeous and huge and it’s gone now and he thought maybe he’d outgrown or destroyed the part of him that could fall in love like that and maybe he was even relieved, but now he hopes he hasn’t; now he wants that part of his heart to light up again, someday. He wants to believe it still can.

“Do you, Penny Adiyodi,” Julia says with a grin, “take Kady Orloff-Diaz to be your partner in crime, your light and your guide, your home and your North Star, through whatever other fucked up shit is heading your way, till death and beyond the grave?”

“ _Hell_ yeah,” says Penny.

“And do you, Kady Orloff-Diaz,” says Julia, “take Penny Adiyodi to be your partner in crime, your light and your guide, your home and your North Star, through whatever other fucked up shit is heading your way, till death and beyond the grave?”

“I already fucking have,” says Kady.

“Then,” says Julia, “by the power vested in me because I filled out a form on the website Get Ordained Dot Org, I now pronounce you married as shit. Kiss away.”

Penny and Kady tilt towards each other into one dashing goddamn kiss while music kicks up again, the end of a Rolling Stones song, jagged and aching and raw — _love, sister, is just a kiss away_ — and Quentin keeps crying, because he wants it to be true, and because he knows that love is already here.

*

The reception is in the house — specifically, in the house’s literal marble-floored _ballroom_ , who _was_ this woman — and magically trained cater-waiters are already hovering platters of hors d’oeuvres through the space when the guests start trickling in. He clusters with his friends, the sweep of wedding emotions enough to temporarily mute the Eliot Weirdness Channel in his brain, everyone a little giddy and a little softened by the occasion. Julia walks up to them and Quentin nearly spills his champagne throwing his arms around her to squeeze her tight.

“How was the speech,” she says against his shoulder, “was it okay?”

“It was great,” he says, holding on still, “you did so good, Jules. So, so good.”

“That was beautiful, Julia,” says Eliot, raising his glass as Quentin makes himself let go.

“As far as expressions of patriarchal nonsense go,” says Margo, “that one was pretty sweet.”

“Thanks, guys,” Julia says, beaming.

Kady and Penny enter the room to enthusiastic applause; Quentin goes ahead and lets out a cheer for them. “Thanks for being here, everyone,” says Kady. “Now, let’s get to the good shit.”

Music starts to play, bright and upbeat; drinks are mixed at the bar; plates are filled with food — like, shockingly good food, Julia did not fuck around — and emptied and filled again. Quentn’s happy to be there, eating endives stuffed with goat cheese and sipping something green with a minty tang, like a mojito dressing up for the day. He asks Alice about the branch in Modesto and she tells him about their outreach to find out what kind of programming the local community would find useful; he gives Josh an update on the compass and winds up sparking a conversation with him and Margo about what their daemons would be.

“When I was a kid I wanted mine to be something super exotic and cool,” Quentin says, “like a tiger, or a wolf. But now, I don’t know. I think I’m more of like, a hamster or a guinea pig or something.”

“I can see it,” says Margo thoughtfully. “I know Asriel’s a morally complicated figure in the text, but I’ve always thought snow leopard sounded perfect for me. Elegant, but with a bite.” She bares her teeth mock-threateningly, and yeah, that makes sense: something dangerous, but soft, too, if it lets you get close enough.

“I'd always go with something like a beaver,” says Josh, “reliable, you know, sturdy. Not the fanciest mammal in the woodlands, but it gets the job done, and it’s smarter than it looks. Either that or a dog, although aren’t the dogs all servants in the books? That’s kinda fucked up.”

“Sounds extremely British,” Eliot chimes in.

Quentin laughs. “You’re not wrong.”

Margo nudges Eliot. “This is the one with the animal counterparts, we watched the HBO version? James McAvoy? What would yours be?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Bambi?” Eliot strikes a pose with a rakish grin. “A peacock. Dazzling plumage, with zero useful skills.”

Margo smiles and leans against him so he can bend to kiss her forehead, and Quentin wonders if she’s thinking it, too: Eliot is dead wrong. Quentin’s not sure what he would be, but peacock is so far off the mark it would be funny if it weren’t sort of sad. He wonders if Eliot’s doing a bit, playing up the fun answer because unlike the rest of them he doesn’t actually give a shit about what form his soul would take in the universe from a fantasy trilogy for middle schoolers. He hopes that’s the case. He hopes Eliot doesn’t still see himself like that.

Quentin heads to the bar for another one of those minty drinks and runs into Penny, looking happily dazed. “The ceremony was really beautiful, man,” he says. “Seriously.”

Penny grins. “Did you cry?” He says this like he’s taking a survey. Like he wants to gather data on how many people were moved to tears by his totally awesome wedding. Which — he’s kind of earned that, probably.

“Like a baby,” Quentin tells him. Penny’s smile grows somehow even wider.

Quentin sidles up to rest his head on Julia’s shoulder while she’s talking to some people he doesn’t know, feeling cozy and content, and she wraps an arm around his waist to welcome him in. He catches up with Todd; he joins a circle of onlookers to hear the story of how Frankie helped a sweet old Polish woman kick her ex-husband’s sketchy son out of this house. He pops something fried and spicy in his mouth and finds Kady to give her a hug; he’s not sure he’s ever done that before, he realizes once it’s started, but she doesn’t seem to mind, and when he compliments the wedding she confesses she’s having fun. He is, too; maybe weddings are good? His only point of comparison is his mom’s second wedding, and his mom isn’t exactly the festive type. Quentin doesn’t think of himself that way, either, but — maybe that’s not quite as true as he’s always assumed.

The DJ’s turned the volume up and people are feeling looser. Quentin lets Julia drag him onto the emerging dance floor for the nostalgic rush of Hot in Herre, _mostly_ laughing too much to feel completely idiotic, then leaves her with a guy he _thinks_ does not have the chance he’s clearly angling for, but Julia’s surprised him on that front before. He makes his way back to the bar, debating another cocktail versus switching to wine before he settles on asking for a glass of red.

“It’s a pretty nice shindig, right?”

Eliot, slipping into place beside him; Quentin picks up his wine and takes a drink. “It is,” he says.

Eliot orders one of the cocktails, of course; leaning against the bar while he waits he says, “I saw you breaking it down to Nelly. Nice moves.”

Quentin rolls his eyes; the teasing is too familiar to be embarrassing. “You know me. Always looking for the right time to shoot my steez.”

Eliot laughs, but his voice is soft when he says, “I do know.”

Quentin sips his wine. This is — fine? The wedding vibes have washed away some some tension, so that standing next to each other in silence doesn’t feel awkward; that’s good, he thinks. It feels like what he wanted. Quentin looks over Eliot, in his tux with his hair curling perfectly at the edges of his face, holding a glass of something pink and bubbly in his graceful hand, and — he just needs to say it, suddenly. He just needs Eliot to know. “You’re not a fucking peacock.”

Eliot raises his eyebrow. “I think I might find that insulting.”

Quentin shakes his head. “The feathers, that part I get. They’re — shiny, and colorful, and whatever. But — I don’t know, there’s like, other birds with good feathers. Like parrots, or those other ones that live in the tropics. Hummingbirds, maybe, their shit is like — iridescent, that’s pretty good, right? And like —” He looks at his feet, feeling like he’s gone too far but can’t stop now. “You can fucking fly, El. You should stop acting like that’s not true.”

Eliot’s mouth is amused while his eyes are moved. “That’s — very flattering. And for what it’s worth —” He bites his lip, just a second. “I think guinea pig is selling yourself pretty short.”

Quentin shrugs. He doesn’t think that, but it doesn’t seem right to argue. Instead he holds up his cup. “I feel like there should be a toast here, but I don’t know what for.”

Eliot offers up his drink in kind and says, “To having like, dreams or whatever.”

“Sounds fake,” says Quentin, “but okay.”

They clink, cheap plastic against cheap plastic; somewhere in the back of Quentin’s mind Toni complains about the environment. They drink; they bring their cups down; they laugh. They’re moving in slow unison and meeting each other’s eyes. Quentin’s pulse has sped up without permission. His brain is saying it’s not like they’re going to start making out right here in the middle of the wedding, but every other piece of his body is saying that he can read Eliot like he can read magic and something has already started happening, whether they admit it or not; they tripped over the line they keep swearing not to cross and now it’s just a matter of waiting until one of them admits where they are.

God, Eliot looks so fucking good in a tux.

He can do this just once, right? Just — one more transgression, one more slip, one more special occasion, and then — and then they’ll get back on track, because they’ve slipped before and look at them now, talking like grown-ups, so —

Feeling like he’s not fully in control of his own mouth, Quentin says, “Did you — say anything to Margo, before?”

Eliot stares at him for a moment, lips slightly parted. Quentin can see in his eyes, the moment he makes a choice. His voice is neutral but Quentin knows they’ve already decided when Eliot says, “No — Julia, did you —?”

“No,” he says, holding Eliot’s gaze.

“Right,” says Eliot, with a nod that’s almost businesslike; Quentin would laugh if there weren’t fireworks going off in his stomach. “There’s an open guest bedroom on the second floor — out the ballroom through the back, turn left and go all the way down to find the stairs — five minutes?” 

“Three,” Quentin says, and finishes his drink.

Three minutes later they’re making out upstairs, kissing so frantically they can barely hold it together to maneuver their way through the door. Quentin walks Eliot into the bedroom and Eliot shoves his back against the door to slam it shut behind them, a noise which lands in his body as irresistibly hot.

“How did you know this room was here?” he says as they come up for air.

“I’m nosy about rich people’s houses,” says Eliot, “I snooped —”

“This is fine, right?” says Quentin, breathing hard. “This is — like —”

“We’re hooking up,” says Eliot, “at a wedding, people do that all the time —”

“Yeah,” says Quentin, “there’s that Owen Wilson movie about it, with — I wanna say Vince Vaughn?”

“I don’t want you to say anything,” Eliot says roughly, diving in to suck at his neck, and Quentin’s knees buckle with the sensation and the wish.

He runs his fingers through Eliot’s curls, loving the thickness and the fact that Eliot’s too gone for him to care that he’s fucking up his styling; he tugs at them, a little, just enough to bring him up so they can suck face some more, a phrase Quentin has always found kind of gross but feels like he understands intuitively now, with these hungry, filthy kisses that feel like they’re trying to consume each other and Eliot at least is succeeding.

Eliot’s hands, eager and commanding, snake their way beneath his jacket at his waist, run up his sides so that even through the fabric of his shirt Quentin moans into Eloit’s mouth at the heat, sags a little as he lets Eliot manhandle his jacket off his shoulders, toss it to the ground. Eliot kisses him and kisses him and sucks at his bottom lip and fucking yanks his shirt untucked, not even bothering with the buttons like he can’t wait one more second to get his hands, his goddamn hands, spreading against Quentin’s skin, his ribs and his stomach and and the small of his back, digging his fingers into Quentin’s skin possessively, and Quentin feels like he could pass out it’s so good to feel this fucking wanted.

He scrambles to get in at Eliot’s body, his heat and sweat and the soft fuzz there, and when he makes contact it’s like wires connecting in his hindbrain. He shoves himself at Eliot, pushes forward thrilling at the way Eliot yields for him, walking tangled up in each other until they’re at the edge of the cartoonishly large four-poster bed, a fucking lace canopy shadowing a quilt covered in farm animals of all things. Eliot sits on the edge of the bed and pulls Quentin to straddle his lap, and Quentin was already hard as fucking iron but getting to angle against Eliot’s thick cock stiff beneath his own makes him shudder all over as he starts to grind against him while Eliot cups his face in his hands for another kiss.

Surfacing briefly Eliot says, “And like I think this could be good for us, you know?”

“Totally,” Quentin nods, fiddling with Eliot’s buttons so he can get at more skin, “like, if it keeps happening, that’s probably a, a sign, that we need to, like, just let it happen, right, and then —”

“Get it out of our systems,” Eliot says, undoing the button at Quentin’s collar, making quick work of the one beneath that.

“Exactly,” Quentin agrees. He pulls off Eliot’s fucking bow tie — how does he make that look so hot, Jesus — and mouths at the crook of Eliot’s neck, gratified by Eliot’s deep throaty sound. “We just gotta — bang it out, and then — then we’ll be fine —”

Eliot gives up on the buttons, tugs upwards with impatience at Quentin’s shirt; Quentin takes the hint and lifts it off his head while Eliot does the same and for a moment Quentin just stares at his skin and his dark hair and his ribcage heaving. “Fuck,” Eliot breathes, “fuck, you’re so fucking hot —”

Quentin shivers, cries out when Eliot grabs him by the hips and swings him to lie flat on the mattress so Eliot can cover him with his weight. Eliot kisses messily along his jaw, his ear, palms his chest and rubs a thumb over one nipple while Quentin squirms beneath him rutting up against anything he can find and grips onto his bare shoulder blades for dear life. Eliot brings a hand down to stroke firmly at his cock through his slacks and Quentin freaking _whimpers_ as he kisses down Quentin’s front, nuzzling a tease just below his belly button while his hands get to undoing Quentin’s belt, and then he thinks about — shit shit shit shit shit —

— _no_ , Quentin pleads with his brain, _not now, just give me like fifteen minutes, honestly that’s pretty generous given the circumstance, ten, ten minutes and we’ll be good —_

— but he’s thinking already about Penny and Kady, smiling at each other on the grass like nothing mattered except their twinned heartbeats and the love radiating out from the space between them. He’s thinking about crying in a folding chair because he felt like someone was shining a flashlight on the parts of his heart that had spent years in darkness, and how it had hurt but he didn’t want to shut it off. He’s thinking about Julia’s fucking speech, and a love that’s a beginning, not an end. And hating himself for it all the while he says —

“Wait — stop, stop. We can’t — we can’t do this, Eliot.”

Eliot looks up at him eyes wild, nodding fast. “Right. We absolutely cannot do this. That’s a true fact and not just one of the reasons this is so fucking hot.”

“No,” Quentin says, closing his eyes against temptation, “seriously, El, I think… god, I wish I’d thought this ten minutes before or after this exact moment, but — I think we need to stop. For real.”

He opens his eyes. Eliot lifts himself up, sits back on his heels; shifts so that he’s sitting next to Quentin’s legs, instead of on top of them. “Oh. Sorry.”

Quentin has to laugh. “Yeah, I think we can agree to share the blame pretty equally here.” He sits up, crosses his legs. “But El, it’s like — I mean, Penny and Kady up there? You can say whatever the fuck you want about the like, patriarchal heteronormative bullshit of the wedding-indistrual complex, and shit, you’d probably be right, but — I know you want that, with someone, and you — you deserve it.” Eliot — flinches, almost, like he’s been caught out, but he doesn’t argue. “And — and fuck, I think I might want that too, someday, and honestly I don’t really know if I deserve it, but — crazier things have fucking happened, so — maybe. I don’t know. But I do know that — you and me, we’re never going to be able to find that if we keep just — falling on each other’s dicks every time we’re in the same zip code. Like —” He smiles, rueful. “Come on, El. We’re not gonna bang it out. There’s no version of this story where the two of us have sex with each other and want it _less_ after that.”

Eliot’s mouth tilts wryly. “You may have a point.”

“And the other thing is —” Quentin hesitates; this part feels rougher, somehow. More raw and more delicate. More intimate than the sight of Eliot ready to go down on him. But he’s so full right now of what he wants, and it’s so clear suddenly how badly he wants it, that he can’t not grab for it through his fear. So he plunges ahead, fumbling with the words because there’s no script for this kind of confession; he’s making it up as he goes. “The other thing is, El, things have been — so fucking weird between us, and I — hate that, kind of, because — because when I said I wanted to be friends, I didn’t mean — exes who make small talk and fuck when they’re drunk. I — fuck, El, I love you, and I know it’s fucking awkward to say it like that to someone you used to — _be_ with, like that, but — it’s true. I love you, and your friendship means a lot to me, and — yeah, probably it was always going to be weird for a while, after fifty fucking years and months of asshole moves and radio silence, because — shit," he says, tripping over the sadness he's discovering in it as he speaks, "I don’t know how to be your friend anymore. Not really. And that — really fucking freaks me out, because I do want to. I want us to be real friends, good friends. Best friends, again. I want us to be fucking — giving speeches at each other’s weddings one day. And I think — I think we can, actually. I think we can figure it out. Because — um, I don’t really have a good reason for that,” he realizes, “except that I — I really want to, and I’ve, I dunno. I’m still kind of a fuck-up but I’ve figured out a lot more shit than I thought I could, when I left New York, so. Maybe I’m feeling optimistic. So I think — it might be complicated, and it might be weird for a while, but I think we can get there. I think we can be friends. But we’re never going to figure that out if we don’t… stop. I mean —” Quentin shakes his head. “I know you and Margo have your, like, thing, but — I don’t know, I don’t really work like that. And — not to sound conceited, but — I kind of think that you don’t work like that either, when it’s me.”

“Yeah.” Eliot nods, a wistful smile on his face. “You’re right. You’re — being extremely mature, and you’re right.”

“So,” Quentin says, feeling suddenly shy, “friends?”

“Friends,” Eliot says, and he sounds sturdy and glad. “Always, Q.” He bites his lip. “I do sort of wish you’d had this grand revelation sometime before this whole situation got going,” he says, gesturing at his tented crotch.

“Just think of Jabba the Hutt doing the nasty with the Balrog,” says Quentin.

Eliot rolls his eyes. “You know I don’t know what any of those words mean.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, smiling, “but you’re less sexually attracted to me already, right?”

Eliot laughs at that, a laugh that starts in surprise and then becomes real, and Quentin catches the laughter, and then the two of them are cracking up in some dead millionaire’s kitschy guest bedroom waiting for their dicks to calm down so they can get dressed and rejoin the party downstairs, and it should be awkward, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like the first real thing that’s happened between them in years. It feels so good.

*

The penthouse is overrun with friends from out of town crashing for the night or several, so Quentin’s on an air mattress in Julia’s bedroom when they finally blip back home, tipsy and exhausted and glad. “Not to brag,” Julia says, stretching out on her bed, “but I planned a hell of a wedding, didn’t I?”

“You did,” Quentin agrees. It’s funny, being on the floor like this, talking up at the ceiling with Julia a few feet over. Like sleepovers past. “Can I make a confession?”

Julia props her head up, eyes him curiously. “Always.”

“I kind of hooked up with Eliot tonight,” he tells her.

Julia raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But — but then we called things off, and… and I think it’s gonna stick this time. I think that whole part of — of him and me — I think it’s over. For good.”

Julia studies his face in the darkness. “How do you feel?”

“Honestly?” Quentin — reaches into himself, kind of, the way he’s learned to reach into magic. Looking for what’s there; feeling out the texture. Searching for any lingering string of regret. “I feel really good. I feel like I made a good decision, and things are going to be — better.”

She smiles at him sleepily. “I’m glad.”

“Me, too.” She slips her eyemask down and turns on to her side for sleep. Quentin lies in the dark room, enjoying — the feeling of it. Like something has slotted into place, or settled at last. A spell that’s finally been completed, leaving room for something new. He feels so _right_ , so deep within himself, that he leans over to where he’s plugged his phone into the wall and tries to fix the screen, feeling like maybe setting the Eliot thing to rest at last was what his magic’s been holding out for. It doesn’t work, but the anticipated shot of disappointment doesn’t come. Maybe that part of his magic is gone for good, but he has a new way of mending things, now, and he’s learning its potential still; that could be enough for him, he thinks. Like how he’s never going to kiss Eliot again, and their friendship will never be the friendship of two people who didn’t fall in love in another life, but he feels sure in himself that they can make it into something good anyway.

Quentin sits bolt upright on the air mattress.

“Hey, Jules?” he whispers, not wanting to wake her if she’s already sleep.

“Mmm?” She sounds foggy, but not annoyed.

“Can I borrow your laptop?”

Julia turns over, lifts her mask to squint at him. “Sure. Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” he says, “just — I think I might have just had kind of a breakthrough on this thing I’m trying to write —”

Julia opens up her laptop on her nightstand, types in her password, and passes it to him. “Knock yourself out,” she says, and curls back up to sleep.

“Thanks,” he says, although he’s not sure she hears him. He logs in to his email and opens up the document with the article and the document with cites he’s pulled, quotes and concepts and articles and theories, and he starts to type, thinking — it’s not an end, it’s a beginning; thinking — it’ll always be different, it’ll always be new —

*

Quentin types feverishly until nearly dawn; when he reads over what he’s written over coffee in the morning before someone Travels him home, it’s way too wordy like all his first drafts and there’s a couple sentences where he’s not sure what he was trying to say before he gave up or forgot to finish and the organization is a mess, he has to move a lot of shit to get it to actually make sense, but — but the core idea is there, and it feels as true to him as it did last night. It’s a start.

Back in California, he basically lives at his laptop for a few days, drinking coffee which his coffee maker occasionally decides to give a slight hazelnut flavor for reasons he cannot discern, writing and rewriting, cutting and shifting and tidying up and deleting and writing again. It’s fucking _hard_ , getting the nebulous notion in his head into a shape that will be comprehensible on paper, going back and trying where he can to add some elegance in style, but although he’s slightly anxious about making the deadline for _Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ , he doesn’t mind the work. It’s the kind of challenge he likes, seeing the pieces in his mind and feeling his way to the places they connect, trying new joinings and different articulations until he lands on the words that say _yes_ , clear as the magic of an object made whole. He enjoyed this part of college, when he wasn’t too busy having a breakdown to appreciate it; it’s fun to get to revisit it.

As the clock counts down the final hour, wearing a hoodie he’s eager to change out of for the shower he’s going to take as soon as he hits send, Quentin sips another cup of coffee and quadruple-checks the works cited page against the Edinborough site and reads through his work, one last time:

 _Historically, the field of restorations has taken as its domain those acts through which an object, once broken, can return to its initial shape. Indeed, in Jardine’s_ Treatise on Mendings, Repairs, and Others _, the first major attempt to lay down a theoretical basis for the field and still widely considered the groundwork from which the restorative disciplines have been building since (see e.g. Hardy), he identifies as central the use of relative location in mending spells through their reliance on a focal point and axes, arguing that a successful repair in fact depends on a literal re-placement, a placing-back of pieces wrongly separated to their rightful place. Surely the wealth of scholarship and practice this line of thinking has produced speaks to its soundness; on its merits, it hardly needs defense._

_However, recently critiques have been advanced questioning not the easily verifiable advantages of the traditional emphases, but rather their privileging of certain definitions and norms to the exclusion of other potentially legitimate avenues of inquiry and spellcraft. Esparza asks us to ponder, without discarding the legacy of institutional magic, what questions we might pose if we learn to form them outside the borders and constraints imposed by the academy. For the restorative arts, some such questions may include: What is the nature of wholeness, and to what degree can Kawasaki’s concept of totality be sought through restoration of purpose rather than of resemblance? Is post-restorative neutrality in all cases the ideal, or could it be that at the moment a practitioner engages with the potential inherent to broken things, what was inanimate may develop an internal continuity it may behoove the practitioner to respect? Are there ways to fix an object that rely not on movement-back but on alternate directions, or even on a mechanism other than movement itself? Perhaps most saliently, can one consider mended an object which carries proof of its own transformation? This case study is an attempt to begin sketching out responses to these questions intended not as answers but as possibilities, as uncharted terrain in which I hope others will also seek to plant their seeds…._

It’s pretty good, he thinks, looking it over; and it doesn’t really matter at this point, anyway, because the deadline’s here and he’s stuck with what he’s got. Quentin opens the PDF one last time to make sure it didn’t fuck up the formatting, and then he sends it in. It’s time to turn to something new.


	8. Chapter 8

Quentin gives himself some time off, after sending the piece in. He’s been running on caffeine and adrenaline to make it to the deadline, and his brain is kind of fried now that he’s done. He figures he’ll take a little while — just a few days — to catch up on sleep and reset, and then he’ll get back into the swing of things. Poke around with the compass, pick up a new library book. The _New England Mending Review_ is accepting submissions until the end of June; he should familiarize himself with their archives to see if his article might be a match, maybe do some edits to make it more suitable for their vibe. He kind of has a life now, in things he wants to be doing and promises to himself it’s not that hard to keep, and he’s looking forward to returning to it as soon as he stops spending every waking moment feeling like he got stomped on by Godzilla.

So he sleeps in, and he watches TV. He naps through Eliot calling him and feels bad about it but the next time Eliot’s on Earth he responds to Quentin’s apologetic text with _no worries! talk to you next week :)_ and Quentin smiles.

It lingers longer than he was expecting. Quentin sort of thought he’d relax through the weekend and wake up Monday refreshed and ready to get back to it, but Monday comes and he’s still sluggish, pushing against some invisible resistance just to get out of bed. That makes sense, though. He’s not in college anymore; he can’t pull an all nighter and meet Julia for brunch the next day jittery from Red Bull but otherwise unscathed. He should probably get to figuring out a way to expend his energy on things worth working on that doesn’t involve burning out his endocrine system. In the meantime he sleeps in; he watches TV. He takes naps in the afternoon and long slow walks listening to Broken Social Scene in the evening and joins Cynthia for some festival of short documentaries by female filmmakers. It’s not like he has anything to rush towards; he figures it’s probably okay, to wait out the fog.

*

“I’m sorry again I missed you last week,” he says to Eliot on the phone. “I spent a couple days running on like no sleep trying to get this article submitted on time, and I was passed the fuck out when you called.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eliot says lightly. “This was the coffee maker, right?”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. “I’d done all the procedural stuff, the actual magic — it was the theory I was stuck on. Trying to find a way to root it in actual repair work.”

“Did you figure it out?”

“I think I did, yeah — connecting it to this idea that — that something might be a certain way, and maybe it won’t ever be exactly like it was if it hadn’t broken, but — but that’s not the same as staying broken forever, right? Like — that doesn’t mean it can’t be whole, in — in a new way.” He hesitates, thinking about how he actually landed on this revelation and wondering if being Actual Friends Again means he should — tell Eliot: I solved it because of us, because of you. He kind of wants to, honestly, but — it feels too new between them, still. Quentin doesn’t want to ask for too much — intimacy, or whatever the fuck. He wants that — he does; but he’s figuring out now how much they’re allowed to have.

Eliot says, “I like that. I like that a lot.” His pleased smile; his soft eyes.

“Yeah, well,” says Quentin, “we’ll see if the _Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ agrees.”

“How are you feeling now?” Eliot asks. “Better rested?”

“Sort of?” Not really — he’d spent the morning putting off getting dressed doing Su Doku puzzles on his phone, then kind of bummed around the house until Eliot called, and he’s starting to think he should put his afternoon to more productive use when they’re done, but it’s hard to imagine having the energy. He doesn’t want Eliot to worry, though; it’s just taking time. “I think I’m also just getting old.”

“Oh _don’t_ get me started,” Eliot says, in tones of great drama, before launching into a summary of his attempts to redesign the thrones at Whitespire to be more ergonomic. Quentin listens and it’s nice, getting to hear Eliot complain about his lower back — something so unadorned. It’s a start.

*

He’s tired; he’s getting tense. It’s June and the days are long and the sun is shining and the beach should beckon but he wants to stay home. He’s tense because he’s tired, probably; just some psychological overspill of a fundamentally physical problem. He tries to work on cleaning things up for the next deadline, but he can’t focus on reading anything and it just makes him irritable to try. He does make himself go for a run, even though he really isn’t feeling it, and it’s fine; he feels more awake afterwards, for a little while at least. He makes himself get up in the mornings; he makes himself eat a salad. He makes himself go to book club, although he almost regrets it afterwards, because for some reason he spent the whole time getting annoyed at people over completely stupid shit, and he doesn’t think he let it show but he feels weirdly guilty anyway. He takes a beer out of the fridge when he and Luisa get home and like the fucking stupid thing is he does this all the time, right, he’s a fucking adult who has a drink with dinner when he wants to, and he doesn’t know why suddenly it feels like something to _notice_ , but he feels guilty and annoyed about that too, and guilty and annoyed about the second one he has to try to stop feeling this way, and guilty and annoyed about the hangover he wakes up with before going back to sleep.

It’s fine; it’s sleep deprivation; it’s age; it’s the summer heat, June in Southern California and when he drifts off in the afternoons without closing the blinds he wakes up with puddles of sweat on his back. He has a life he wants to be living, and soon that will be enough to pull him back into it. It’s fine.

*

He doesn’t work on the article; he doesn’t text Julia back. He feels like some sticky poison has seeped into him, beneath the skin, through the blood, into his joints, the spaces between his bones. He feels like hitting something, he feels like knocking his own teeth out with a baseball bat. He feels like a fallen branch in a river, caught suddenly in a burgeoning storm.

*

He wakes up hungover a third day in a row and — okay. He’s been here before, and he doesn’t like that, and he doesn’t like knowing that this is a place it’s possible for him to be and necessary for him to address, doesn’t like knowing that he’s a person who might — whatever, if he’s not careful, but he doesn’t have to like it; he just has to — own up to it, and accept that it counts, and make the good choice, so. Even though it’s fine still, probably, and even though it’s not like he’s been doing anything crazy, he just — he just won’t have a drink with dinner, today. Just like he does all the time. It’s not a big deal, and he’ll just — prove that, today and maybe a couple more days, to be sure, and then it’ll be fine. Maybe he’ll do a week, and then reassess. That’ll probably help with the exhaustion anyway, so — okay. Good plan.

*

He wakes up hungover a fourth day in a row and he wants to fucking cry.

A year. He’s been in California nearly a year and somehow this is still his life. He’s run so many stupid miles and dragged hiimself through so much shit and fixed so many goddamn things and here he is again, lying in bed with a headache he gave himself staring at the white wooden blinds scared out of his mind because he’s drinking too much and he can’t make himself stop. And the fucked up thing is that a year ago he could fill a Russian novel with the shit he was drinking to forget, but he doesn’t know where it’s coming from now. His life is decent; he’s doing okay. He’s out of things to fix.

“What the fuck is wrong with me,” he says out loud to the empty room, like some dark nothing will be able to answer.

He wants to fucking break something.

Quentin rolls over and cups his palms together, listens into the ambient for the right strain. He fills his hands with water, drains them dry; works the spell a few more times, ebbing and flowing like waves on the beach. Tuning the spell so that the water rises and falls with the rhythm of his breath, the slow belly breathing beloved of both the running form coaches of YouTube and fucking Alana with her chatter about the stream of life. In and out; in and out. In and out until he feels — not better, exactly; he feels like shit and he doesn’t see that ending soon. But clear-headed enough to set his feet down and think, instead of diving into an escape that will only make things worse.

Step one: Advil and water.

Once he’s started hydrating, he tries to work through his options. _Just get it together_ didn’t work yesterday, and he hates that he knows it won’t work today, but lying to himself about that has only ever fucked him over, so — he needs something more. He needs someone else, but none of the obvious choices feel right: he doesn’t want to bother Kady with this two weeks after her wedding, he doesn’t want to hassle Luisa while she’s busy with work, he doesn’t want Julia to know what he’s done to himself again.

Even as he’s ruling them out, some part of him points out impatiently that he’s being fucking stupid. All three of them would take an uncomfortable conversation over whatever possibilities lie ahead if he stays alone; he’s managed to learn that much from the grace of their love, however long it’s taken. That doesn’t make him feel better, though. It just reveals the real issue, which is that he feels like if he has to talk about this he’s going to fucking die. Like a biological time bomb, like he’ll open his mouth and his guts will splay apart, skin splitting with a sick spray of blood, and he knows that this is _fully insane_ but every muscle in tense like his body won’t let him convince himself that’s true. So — so he can fucking die, and god, he fucking hates that some sliver of him still hears that like a wish, but — but he’s thinking through his options, and if he’s not going to die, and he’s can’t not die alone, and he can’t talk about it, then —

With a sigh he takes out his phone and does a quick Google search and navigates through the results.

Staring at the screen he thinks: I could still choose death. But despite the knot of despair at the center of his chest, there’s no heat there anymore. He doesn’t mean it. Not really.

He guesses that’s something.

Ten minutes later he’s dressed and riding his bike to a coffeeshop in University City.

*

Quentin doesn’t know if any of these people were present the last and only time he came to a meeting here. The only person he remembers is the girl with the pink hair and the abusive ex, and frankly if she’s changed her hair since he doesn’t think he’d recognize her face. He tries to look very focused on his phone and his coffee to fend off warm welcomes; he’s not here to get help, exactly. He’s here because here he won’t be alone, and probably he’ll hate but maybe now he can deal with it enough that it won’t make things _worse_ , and when it’s over maybe he’ll feel up to talking to someone and if not, he can get back on his bike and find another one to sit in killing time away from the fucked up shit he can do to himself. He’s here to be careful; he thinks he can handle that. He thinks if he couldn’t, he wouldn’t have managed to come.

To his surprise, it’s not as hateful as he remembers meetings being. The twelve steps is still a little culty, and the choral greetings still give him spiritual hives, but — the actual members don’t set him off the way they did. They’re very earnest, and sometimes kind of corny; some of them are palpably anxious, some are boisterous in a way that feels like overcompensating. One guy curses out his higher power over the fact that he can’t have a beer on his fiftieth birthday, then talks himself into agreeing with a begrudging acceptance that Quentin finds resonates; another man talks through some of the ways the alcoholic living in his brain, as he puts it, has tried to convince him to have a drink, laughing at his own warped logic. Quentin’s not exactly enjoying himself, and he doesn’t think he’ll be coming back often if at all — for better or worse, he’s not planning on committing to lifelong sobriety anytime soon — but there’s something nice in understanding suddenly that the people at the meetings are just — people. People trying to be better than they were. He couldn’t handle that last summer, stuck so deep in the quicksand worst of himself that he couldn’t imagine a way out, but he doesn’t mind it now. It eases him, just a bit, to realize he can see that, when he couldn’t before. It reminds him that he’s trying to be better, too.

A woman stands up to share; she tucks a strand of her curly blonde hair behind her ear before she begins, metal bracelets jangling along her arm. “It’s been hard this week,” she says; her voice wavers when she speaks. “Probably the hardest it’s been, since my first couple days out of rehab. Some of you know that I lost my mother last year, right around this time.” Quentin’s grip tightens on his coffee cup. “I was still drinking then, and —” She starts to cry; takes off her glasses to wipe her eyes. Quentin can’t swallow, can’t breathe. He feels like he’s fallen through ice. Darkness surrounding him, cold filling his lungs.

The woman says, “I just keep thinking about — I never really said goodbye. I couldn’t. Because even when I was with her, I wasn’t with her.” And — yeah, Quentin doesn’t want to — he can’t —

— do this —

He doesn’t remember standing up; he doesn’t remember leaving. He’s outside in the heat, standing by his bike blocks from the coffeeshop, hands gripping the handlebars like he’ll collapse without something to hold on to, breathing hard and wishing he were dead because his father is gone and he’ll never —

— he’ll never see his dad again. Never ever, not once in all the miserable decades he might yet live. He’ll never tell his dad how sorry he is that he wasn’t there when it counted the most; he’ll never tell his dad how sorry he is for everything else, for every stupid fucking fight and every one-word answer and every ungrateful roll of his eyes. He’ll never say _I’m sorry for being a fuck-up_ and he’ll never say _I’m sorry for bringing back the thing that killed you_ and he’ll never say _I’m sorry for complaining when you sang along with Bob Dylan in the car_. Sorry for turning eight and deciding it was embarrassing that his dad tried to kiss his head when he picked him up from school. Sorry for making his dad see his kid in a fucking mental hospital. Sorry for ninth grade when he ended every argument by shouting _I wish I lived with Mom!_ Sorry for not knowing that one day it would all be gone.

Never. Never another hug Quentin shrugs off too quick, never another _Law and Order_ marathon, never another baseball game Quentin doesn’t give a shit about. Never that tender look in his father’s quiet eyes, the one Quentin could never meet head-on. _I want to fix what I’ve broken_ , his father said, and now they never will.

Never like a tumor, like a punctured lung, never like the bottom of the sea. Airless and eternal, grief crushing him to sand. He doesn’t know how to live with never, he doesn’t know if he can. He doesn’t know if he wants to, and he can feel it rising in him, fresh and raw like nothing else has ever been real, like nothing else could be real because his dad is gone and never coming back, his harsh ugly longing, the desire for destruction, the urge to raze his life to ash and tear himself apart, to throw every piece of himself that can feel this into an inferno and to make it hurt all the way down. And why the fuck not, he thinks wildly, desperately, stupidly, ragingly, why the fuck not drink himself to death or find some other pyre to burn himself on sooner rather than later if this is the alternative? What does it matter if he does what he should or does what he wants, if he makes magic and mends objects, if he spends fifty fucking years trying and showing up and not killing himself, what is any of that shit _for_ if none of it is going to bring his father back. If he’s going to have to do all of it, every goddamn second, knowing he’s gone. What is the fucking point — and it hits him so painfully it nearly sends him to his knees and so clearly he could almost laugh —

— what’s the fucking point of being better, if his dad won’t be around to see it?

It feels like a long time he can’t do anything but sink with it. He’s started crying, he doesn’t know when he started crying; he collapses to the ground, his bike clattering besides him, burying his face in his knees, arms around his legs like a little kid scared at a sleepover, wishing and wishing his dad was here. He misses his dad; his dad is gone. He’s gulping sobs coming from so deep within him he’s nearly hyperventilating, like it doesn’t even matter if he wants to live or die because his lungs have decided there’s not enough oxygen in a world where he misses his dad and his dad is gone. It feels like dying, like falling apart. Like he’s disintegrating, dissipating into the ether and feeling as it leaves him every piece, every cell, every molecule. Every atom vibrating with the words: I love you and I’m sorry and you’re gone.

Eventually he stops. He doesn’t feel better; it’s more like he trips over the physical limit of how long a human body can cry its guts out before some unconscious mechanism kicks in to prevent it from damaging its internal organs. His stomach hurts, and so does his head. He needs to stand up but his dad is dead. Also he’s just had a complete meltdown on a public sidewalk, and while he’s too hollowed out to feel embarrassed, he’s not looking forward to lifting his head and confronting any concerned looks. This is San Diego; people notice if you pull that shit here.

For the first time since coming to California he feels violently homesick — homesick for New York, where you can cry as hard as you want on the subway and the most you’ll get is someone might offer you a napkin without making eye contact; homesick for New Jersey, a state he grew up in waiting to leave. Homesick for the house he’ll never go back to, homesick for the living room where his father ate frozen dinners on a tray and watched the evening news. Homesick like he doesn’t have a home, a loneliness that slices to his marrow, like he’s cut off from anything that ever made him, like there’s nowhere he can turn to remember who he is.

But that’s not true.

He takes his phone out of his pocket, reading the date on the cracked screen: June 16. In three days, his dad would be turning fifty-six. That’s part of what June always was, for him: summer heat, final exams. The last hours of school, long twilight adventures with Julia. And this: dinner at the Italian place with the fish he liked, a movie at the theater with the cheap matinees in town. After the divorce, his dad never had anyone besides his kid to celebrate with; it didn’t occur to Quentin to find that weird. But it wasn’t just the two of them, most years; his dad felt sorry for him, maybe, or guilty for making him go through the ritual alone, so he always said he could invite a friend. And Quentin always did.

He hesitates a moment, looking at her number, but — she would want him to call, for this. He can feel the truth of it — as sure as he knows the sound of her voice.

“Jules,” he says when she picks up the phone. His voice is rough. “Are you, uh — are you busy? Like now, or this week, or…”

“I have a couple things, but nothing that can’t be moved around,” says Julia. “Why? What’s up?”

“I just, um —” He takes a breath, trying to hold it together enough to say — he doesn’t even know what. He can’t think enough to say more than the simplest, truest thing. “I just really miss my dad.”

His voice cracks into a sob and then he’s crying again, too hard to say more, but that part’s okay, because she understands. “Hey,” she says, “I’m coming, okay? You’re not alone.”

“Yeah,” he manages, “okay. Thank you. Okay.”

“I’m gonna hang up now,” she says, “but I love you, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says again, grateful. She hangs up and he doubles over with the weight of his grief, his body shaking with it. Then he straightens up, tries to breathe; tries it again, until it works; gets on his bike and starts riding south. Julia’s coming; he has to make it home.

*

He crumples into bed as soon as he gets back, so worn through he’s out in an instant. When he wakes up, slight headache between his eyes, Julia’s sitting at his desk, typing on her laptop.

For a moment he doesn’t say anything; he can’t. The sight of her slender fingers tapping efficiently away, the slight line between her brows she always gets when she’s concentrating — there’s too much in it, his love and his gratitude and his grief fighting for space, leaving him no room to breathe.

She lifts her chin, thinking, and catches him looking at her. “Hey,” she says softly, a small smile curling at her mouth.

“Hey,” he whispers back.

She shuts her laptop and comes to sit at the edge of the bed. “How are you feeling?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that, except to start to cry. Or else that is his answer — another strain of his bottomless weeping like a fresh movement in some godforsaken neverending concerto, heaving sobs that feel like they come from his guts, drawing him in on himself, curling his body head to knee in a shivering comma of grief. The ache is so total that it takes a minute to notice when Julia’s settled herself into the space at his back, sliding her hand to his. Offering something to hold on to. He grips it close to himself, clutching her love to his chest, feeling everywhere the hideous weight of _never_ , the knife’s edge of _sorry_ ; feeling like without her anchoring him in place, the maelstrom of loss might wash him away.

It hurts; it hurts; it hurts; and then it doesn’t hurt any less, but the pain recedes like low tide. Leaving room for the rest of the world to trickle back in.

Quentin breathes in, like a test; again, and again. Air filling his lungs; heart beating on. His face is a wet sticky mess; he can’t breathe through his nose. It occurs to him that at various points in his life he would have been sure it should be beyond humiliating, to let Julia see him like this, and the thought is so fucking stupid that he wants to go back in time and slap his past self in the face for ever having it. Don’t you know, he wishes he could tell that younger idiot Quentin; don’t you fucking know that this is bullshit? Don’t you know that one day your dad will be dead and nothing will matter, next to that. Stupid fucking kid.

Out loud he croaks, “He told me he wanted to fix things.”

Julia props herself up behind him; he can feel her eyes on his face, even if he can’t handle looking back to meet them. “Your dad?”

Quentin nods. “When he told me about the cancer. He said he wanted to fix what he’d broken between us. Like he thought it was his fault that I was…” It doesn’t seem worth finishing the thought.

“He was a parent,” Julia says.

Quentin snorts. “Yeah, that sounds exactly like all the parents we know.”

“He was a good one.” A smile in her voice. “Not that I’m an expert, but I think they always feel — responsible. For…” She pauses; continues carefully. “No matter who their kids are.”

“Maybe.” Quentin tries to reach back into memory, to see: was that what it was like? When Teddy had his dark adolescent moods? He didn’t have many of them; temperamentally he took after his mother, lucky for — all of them, probably. Maybe sometimes Quentin did look at his sullen shoulders and think: I broke this, it was me. It sounds like something he would think. That life feels very far away at the moment. Like it’s been hidden behind a cloud. “I showed him some magic.”

“You told me.”

“And I told him about —” It’s like he hates the very word, suddenly. It feels so meaningless, next to — “The fucking quest. The time key, my other life. Not all of it, but — my wife, my son.” He hadn’t told his dad about Eliot, which — he really doesn’t have the bandwidth to unpack that right now. “When I was telling him about the plan, what I was gonna do. That he would probably — I wanted him to see that I’d, that I’d lived, or whatever. So — so he could know that it wasn’t his dumbass kid making this huge decision. It was this, like, mature adult person who’d grown up, somewhere he hadn’t been around to see it, and become this person who could — god, I was such a fucking asshole.”

Julia strokes her thumb just barely back and forth on his hand.

“I thought,” he says, “I thought, okay. He wanted to fix it, so — so I’m going to tell him about this thing I’ve done, this thing I’m doing, and how — it changed me, it made me the person I was always supposed to become, and — and then it’ll be fixed, because — because isn’t that what parents want? For their kids to —” He stops, swallowing back tears.

“Some of them do,” Julia says, half-rueful.

Quentin thinks: Teddy smiling, Teddy laughing, Teddy playing in the grass. “Not the good ones, though. And he was — he was good. I didn’t make it fucking easy on him, but he was good.”

“You were a kid,” she says gently. “I know it’s hard, but — that wasn’t your job.”

“I was an adult when he got fucking brain cancer, though,” he says. “And I didn’t — he said he wanted to fix things and I as good as blew him off. He was dying and I did a couple fucking magic tricks, like that meant anything.” Heat rushes to his face with belated embarrassment at how much he’d been convinced it meant, at the time. Another sign, another fucking story he’d clung to. “I didn’t even try, like — what the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn’t I even fucking — _try_ , to —”

Julia shifts her weight to lie down, nestles her chin against his shoulder. Something in him notes and appreciates the closeness there.

“And now,” he goes on, “now I’m actually kind of — doing okay, now I’m almost —” Now he has a life he wouldn’t be ashamed for his father to see. “And I keep thinking — he’s never going to know that. He’s never going to see his son — it’s like, I’m finally on my way to becoming someone he would be proud of, and it feels fucking awful, because I’m never going to get to show him. Not — not some summary of a life that never actually happened, but here, now, in real time, I’ll never —” He’s growing up and it feels like dying, because his dad isn’t here to watch.

Julia squeezes him, a little. “I can’t imagine what that feels like,” she says near his ear. “But, Q — I really don’t think he was waiting for anything, to be — I think he was already proud of you.”

Quentin’s ears burn. “For what?”

“For being you,” she says, so simply it lodges itself in his throat. “For being kind, and brave, and good.”

He bites his lip. “I don’t know if I was much of those, with him.”

“You were his kid,” she says. “I think that’s kind of how it goes. For better or worse.”

Quentin thinks again of Teddy: his two-year-old tantrums, his slamming doors. Slowly, so as not to throw Julia off him, he sits up. Nothing has changed, but his body feels like a body again, instead of roiling mass of hurt. For now, at least. “I feel like I’m probably going to fall apart again in like an hour,” he says, “but I think I’m kind of — grieved out, for now, if you wanna get pizza or something. There’s this vegan place we order from a lot that’s actually pretty good.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand, a choice he immediately regrets. He needs a tissue.

“I’d like that,” says Julia, and Quentin doesn’t understand how it is that through the muck of everything, he can still feel grateful for her smile.

*

It goes like that, for a while. The grief comes in waves, flooding his senses so that nothing else can touch him; in between Julia lets him be silent, or lets him talk. About his guilt, about his unsaid apologies, about everything he’ll never fix; then other shades start seeping in, the things he misses which hurt to remember but feel right to say out loud. His dad’s meatloaf, his shelf of biographies; his laughter, the smell of his aftershave when he hugged Quentin hello. The way he sang along with Dylan in the car. His thing for military history, the way he chuckled at his own goofy jokes.

“Do you remember,” he says while they’re sitting with their legs stretched out on his bed, “how every single year, he’d go into his whole spiel about how the universe screwed him over by making him be born the week of Father’s Day?”

Julia laughs. Quentin is so grateful to have someone who remembers with him that he could hold on to her and never let go. “I remember. And then he’d always wrap it up by looking at you and saying maybe it was only fair, since he got the best gift of all.”

“It was so cheesy,” says Quentin, a lump in his throat.

“It was sweet,” she says.

“Did you ever think it was weird?” he asks her. “That you always came over for your friend’s dad’s birthday?”

Julia wrinkles her brow. “No — not until right now, actually. I guess that is weird — kids don’t really do that, right? But —” She shrugs. “I don’t know. It was just one of our things, you and me. You know how kids are — whatever they see, they assume it makes sense. Even when it’s totally bugfuck crazy.”

“Yeah.” Quentin slips his hand into hers, thinking about — everything that seemed normal, when he was living it, that turned out not to be. All those moments he had, watching Teddy grow up, when it struck him that someone had done something right in his past, or dawned on him that someone hadn’t. A thought hits that probably should have occurred to him before. “Does my mom know I’m alive?”

Julia blanches. “She kind of… didn’t know you were dead.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow at her.

“I’m sorry,” Julia says, “I was going to tell her, I swear, I found her number in your phone and I had it typed in, and I just — I couldn’t do it. I’d started thinking of what we could do, to get you back, and telling her felt like — like giving up before we began. Like that would make it real, and permanent. And — I mean you guys were never exactly close, so… I figured it would be okay, to wait it out for a while. Sorry. I know that was fucked up.”

Quentin shrugs. “She’s the one who hasn’t heard from me in two years and is apparently assuming that’s normal, so. I think that’s kind of objectively more fucked up.”

Julia rests her head on his shoulder. “I told myself, if it was a year later and we weren’t any closer, then I’d tell her. But… I don’t know if I would’ve gone through with it.”

Quentin leans into her. He likes the familiar closeness of her against his side. His dad is dead and his mom is three thousand miles away presumably not giving a shit, but he likes it anyway. Life is so fucked up. “I feel like I should — I don’t know, like some of the shit with my dad should be transferring,” he says. “Like if I feel so fucking guilty I didn’t — make things right, before he died — shouldn’t I like, get on that, with the parent I have that’s actually alive? But I don’t actually fucking want to.” He drums his fingers on his leg. “Do you think that’s fucked up?”

Julia laughs. “You’re asking _me_ to weigh in on whether your relationship with your mother is fucked up?”

“Yeah,” he says, “I am. And my dad’s dead, so you have to answer.”

“I mean if you’re fucked up about it, this one’s kind of her fault, right?” says Julia.

“I feel like that’s a copout,” he says.

“I think anyone lucky enough to have you in their life who can throw away two years of that deserves whatever they have coming,” she says. “And I don’t think you owe her shit.”

“That seems kind of harsh.”

“I’m kind of harsh,” says Julia. “And I haven’t talked to my mom since I was twenty-one. So — I guess if you’re fucked up, so am I. And I’m not really bothered about it. But you’re also nicer than I am, so. If you change your mind, I think that’s okay too.”

Quentin’s about to question whether she really thinks he’s nicer than she is, but his phone starts to ring. “That’s probably Eliot.”

“Are you gonna pick up?”

Quentin shakes his head. “Things are — better, with us, but still kind of… a work in progress. I kind of don’t feel like dealing with how to befriend my ex-boyfriend right now.” The phone stops ringing. “Does that make me an asshole?”

“I feel like your dad’s death is a pretty good excuse for missing a phone call,” says Julia.

“For how long, though?” says Quentin, unconvinced. “If people just spent the rest of their lives in mourning, the world would fall apart. So there’s gotta be an expiration date on that, right?”

“Maybe,” says Julia. “But — even if there is, I kind of feel like the clock starts ticking after the mourning begins.”

“It’s been two years,” Quentin says. “That feels like a long time, if we’re talking about shit like — answering phone calls.”

Julia sits up, waits until he looks at her. “It’s been two years since he died,” she says. “I don’t think it’s two years since you started mourning. I think it’s been like, two days. And I was there when you found out, so. I sort of feel like I would know.”

Quentin thinks back: the voice mail from his mother, the sun setting outside the penthouse windows. He tries to remember how he felt, when he heard, but it’s like remembering a movie he watched, or something that happened to someone else. He can see Julia at the table, her serious expectant face, the shape of the phone in his hand, but when he tries to touch what happened inside him when the words hit his skull, there’s nothing there. “Maybe you’re right.” He scrubs his face with his hands. “Can I crash with you tomorrow? We’re doing the solstice thing and I’m not exactly in the mood for partying.”

“Of course,” says Julia. “You don’t need an excuse. You can just come.” She plants a kiss on his cheek and nestles back in at his side, and it feels like one good thing in this awful world that’s somehow miraculously survived.

*

The penthouse is empty when Twenty-Three blips them back; he’s apparently taken to spending more time in Fillory along with the usual off-world crew, while Kady and Penny aren’t exactly honeymooning but have let themselves take some weekends out of town for fun. Julia doesn’t know where Alice is, and Quentin finds that he kind of wishes she were here. She’s the only person he’s watched live through this. Maybe she would have some advice.

He can’t tell if it’s numb exhaustion setting in or a sign that some internal sky is clearing, but the black hole of despair surrounding the memory of his dad seems to have lessened its pull for now; mostly he wants to watch movies he doesn’t have to think about with his best friend and not talk. Julia pours a bowl of some artisanal flavored kettle corn and doesn’t press him. Quentin doesn’t know if he’s enjoying himself, exactly, sitting through _Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back_ and _Office Space_ , but he can’t imagine anywhere else he’d rather be. He figures that’s the best he can hope for right now.

As they’re about to start _Pirates of the Caribbean_ , Julia gets a phone call that makes her do something serious with her face, and after some insistent reassurance on his part that he’ll be fine left to the kettle corn and his own devices for a few minutes, she takes the phone to her room with a promise that she’ll be back soon. Quentin takes the opportunity to notice that he’s thirsty — his body feels like an afterthought he’s only just starting to notice — and while he’s at the kitchen sink pouring himself a glass of water, the clock opens and Eliot walks in.

Quentin freezes. Which is stupid, because — they’re friends, and it’s awkward but it’s — fine, they’re not the kind of friends yet who talk about shit like being fucked up about your dad who’s been dead for two years, and maybe they will be if Quentin doesn’t fucking ruin it before then, but for now they’ll talk and it’ll be weird and it would be nice if he weren’t fucked up about his dead dad, but he is so it’ll be excruciating but that’s not Eliot’s fault, so — fine.

“Eliot,” he manages. His voice sounds — normal, he thinks. He lifts his glass of water up in greeting, then feels like an idiot.

Eliot says, “Q. I didn’t know you were in the city.” He’s smiling, but it looks a little strained, almost like he’s — disappointed? Hurt, that Quentin didn’t tell him? Quentin — can’t unpack that now.

“Yeah,” Quentin says, scrambling for a plausible excuse, “just for a little while — chilling with Julia. What about you,” he asks to change the subject, “what brings you over?”

“Josh is deep in prep mode,” Eliot says with a slight and not unfond roll of his eyes, making his way toward the kitchen. “Asked if I wouldn’t mind bringing over the knives, apparently none of the ones we have at Whitespire are behaving themselves to his liking today.”

“Ah,” says Quentin, nodding. “Well — here you go,” he says, picking up the wooden knife block and holding it out. He’s being very normal, he thinks, which is — good.

Eliot takes it. “Thanks.” He peers at Quentin’s face. “Is everything okay?”

Quentin swallows against a sudden tightness in his throat. “Yeah,” he says, studiedly light. He tries for a puzzled smile. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Eliot shakes his head, looking uncharacteristically embarrassed. “Sorry, for a second I just thought you seemed — I don’t know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Quentin waves this off. “Don’t worry about it.” His stomach hurts. He tries to breathe into it like Alana says at yoga but he can’t get his lungs more than halfway full before something in his body makes him stop.

“Alright, well — tell Julia I said hi,” says Eliot. “Have fun.”

Quentin nods in acknowledgement. “I’ll see you around.”

“See you,” Eliot echoes, and turns to walk back to the clock.

And it’s like — like a roof collapsing under the weight of a storm he couldn’t even hear until it was flooding the room. Like he’s been straining with the effort of casting this illusion that things are fine and he doesn’t have the strength to keep going. Like the house of cards he’d been hiding inside has blown away and in the daylight he can see things as they are, and how they are is that Quentin is sad and exhausted and so lonely he feels like he’s been thrown into the void of outer space and he just can’t — he doesn’t have it in him to hide anymore. Even from himself.

“Wait,” he hears himself saying, “El —”

Eliot turns around, an inquisitive look on his face. “What’s up?”

“It’s my dad’s birthday,” Quentin says, choking up as he speaks. “That’s why — it’s his birthday today and it’s been — the past couple weeks, I don’t — I kind of couldn’t really be around people, but I couldn’t be alone, and, um — so, so Julia came out, for a couple days, and I’m here now, and — and it’s just been kind of hard, so —”

Eliot’s already standing in front of him, setting the block down; hesitating, biting his lip. Then he’s reaching out and wrapping Quentin in his arms, sure and warm and safe, and Quentin is buckling against him, clutching to stay upright, crying against Eliot’s chest. He doesn’t know if he’s crying for his grief or for Eliot’s kindness; he doesn’t know anything, there aren’t any words in his head. He knows that it hurts and he knows that Eliot’s here.

When he calms down enough to talk again, he steps back, staying close. “Sorry — I’m sorry —”

“Why are you apologizing,” says Eliot, looking genuinely confused.

“I don’t know, I —” He rakes his hair back, takes in some air. Manages a thick and slightly hysterical laugh. “When I said I wanted to be friends for real I didn’t really think we’d be heading straight to crying on your shoulder about my dead father. I thought we’d kind of, you know. Build up to that.”

Eliot gracefully swipes a napkin from the dispenser on the counter and dabs at the spaces beneath Quentin’s eyes. “I bond fast, remember?”

Unbelievably Quentin feels his mouth curving into a watery smile. “Time is an illusion.”

“I was kind of kidding, when I said that. But —” Eliot place a hand on his shoulder. Instinctively Quentin moves his own hand to meet him. “It’s true that I don’t — I don’t really have any other kinds of friends. I don’t know if I have kind of a — thing for intense people, or what, but — that’s how it’s worked out, for me. I don’t really know how that in-between step goes.” He gives a crooked smile.

Quentin thinks about Eliot back at the cottage, talking him off a dozen stupid ledges. How impossible it was to hide from him, even then. He knows Eliot wouldn’t have done that for anyone, but — he thinks it would have been more people than Eliot would have guessed, at the time. He wonders if by now Eliot’s figured that out. “I guess that tracks.”

“Do you…”

There’s a question behind Eliot’s eyes like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to ask it, and Quentin doesn’t know if he’s allowed either, but — fuck it. His dad is dead, and things between them will never be okay. He can live with some awkwardness, if it means he stops wasting time. So he says, “Can you stay? I mean — after you drop off the knives, can you come back and just —”

He doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“Of course,” says Eliot, and his shoulders drop in relief, like Quentin’s the one who’s doing him the favor. God, he’s so — that’s really what he’s fucking like.

“We’re not — I mean it’s not like listening to me talk about my dead dad all night,” Quentin says. “Mostly we’re watching movies. We were gonna order from that Indian place she likes, maybe.”

“I —” Eliot pauses, and Quentin can see in his face the choice he makes, to keep going. “I would have no problem listening to you talk about your dad all night. But —” He smiles. “Movies are good, too.”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. He takes a long breath. In and out. Feeling the air cool in his body. The space his lungs make for it. “Thanks.”

*

If Julia has thoughts about Eliot joining them, she keeps them to herself; as far as Quentin can see, she’s all smiles when he gets back from Whitespire, changed into a simple blue shirt and dark slacks. Quentin settles on the couch between the two of them and feels cocooned. Small and still and protected, until he’s ready for something bigger than watching a silly movie with lots of swordfights based on a fucking Disney ride.

“I know Johnny Depp is a creep,” he says while Jack and Will bicker about whether Will’s obsessed with treasure, “but he was really hot in this movie.” He half-regrets it the second it’s out of his mouth — the sweet peacefulness of their set-up lulled him into letting his guard down — but then again, he wants to let his guard down, doesn’t he? Isn’t that part of being friends, too?

“Really?” Julia wrinkles her nose. “I was always an Orlando Bloom girl.”

“Same,” says Eliot, and Quentin feels himself relax.

“What the fuck,” he says to Julia, “this is like the Chris Pine thing all over again.”

“Ugh, I _love_ Chris Pine,” Eliot sighs.

“You people are hopeless,” Quentin says, and it feels — nice. It makes him feel like he’s a person, and not a pile of soggy rags animated by some malicious necromancer, which has been kind of the vibe the past couple days. Like here between his two best friends with their inexplicably bland taste in guys, he’s returning to his own body, bit by bit.

A year ago, he remembers suddenly — a year ago today, he almost destroyed this. The exact thing that’s keeping him from disintegrating, the swell of love at either side of him tethering him life, and he doused it in kerosene and struck a match to watch it burn. The shame of it burns through him, the memory of being that person so afraid to let his grief touch him that he decided that rather than live with it he’d destroy his own ability to be touched, and fuck anyone who had a different idea. He hates it — he hates what he did and he hates what became of the son his dad raised and he hates that his dad won’t ever see the person he is now who might be a wreck but isn’t what he was. He doesn’t know why he’s been forgiven. He doesn’t know how to forgive himself. He doesn’t know how it is that he’s supposed to grow up again, where his dad can’t see, except that it must be happening because a year ago he thought this would have killed him and here he is, next to Eliot and next to Julia, awash with their care and so grateful it hurts, like everything else hurts, but he’s surviving.

*

Quentin wakes up in a spare room at the penthouse feeling — light. Like a ship after a storm, floating easily on the water. Like someone came in the night and tuned up his cells and now gravity works the normal way again. He lies in bed for a few minutes, waiting for sorrow to overcome him once the grogginess of sleep eases, but — it doesn’t. And he knows — he doesn’t know how he knows — it’s not going to. It’s there still, and real still, but — tragedy and time. Something in him has stilled. Like his grief was a wild animal snapping teeth at his throat, but he gave it what he wanted and it’s been appeased. Like what it wanted all along was to be known. To be seen and not to be alone. Like anyone.

In the kitchen Julia is making coffee at the French press and Eliot is setting out bagels from the place down the street and for a second Quentin stands barefoot at the periphery and watches them and wants to cry because he hurt them and because he loves them and because the bagels in California are never as good because of that thing someone said at a party once about the tap water in the city. Because he feels like he’s coming back into his life and from the edge it’s almost too vast, the terror and the miracle of it. Then he joins his friends, starting their day.

*

Back in California the world he’s built for himself is waiting patiently for his return. There’s comfort in that, in a sturdiness that comes from his own hands, even as he feels a little delicate, still, those first few days. A little teary, a little lonely. His grief lives with him, and he’s not afraid of what it might do to him. There are moments when it sends a bad idea cutting through his chest, and he remembers how thoroughly he’s proven to himself that those ideas never work even for forgetting. There are times he feels fine, feels even good, feels content to be reading scholarship in his sort-of field or hanging out with the people he’s come to think of as friends, and his grief stirs in his gut and makes it feel like a betrayal, like every new spark is an abandonment of someone who loved him; and he listens to the grief like listening to magic, letting it show him what it needs and promising to stay firm while it flows through him, until it quiets again.

He stays out of his room as much as possible, letting his days collide with the others in the house, glad to be carried by their energy when he can. He calls Julia more than usual, sometimes to reminisce about his dad’s funny habits or the paternal sweetness he sees only in retrospect of his enthusiasm for science fairs and elementary school writing celebrations, sometimes just to talk. He starts texting Eliot, nothing important, just little shots of connection that remind him he’s not alone, and sometimes if Eliot’s on Earth to receive it instead of texting back he’ll call and it feels comfortable and easy, and sometimes he tells Quentin Margo’s busy as hell but she says hey. He misses the submission deadline but he emails Josh an article from _North American Mending Review_ that seems like it might have interesting implications for greenhouse design, and catches up with Penny and Kady when their beach getaway coincides with Ray and Toni’s summer barbecue. He calls Alice and they talk about her job, and his magic, and dads, and death. It turns out she does have advice, but it’s the same as the advice she’s been giving him for a long time: you just live.

“It’s weird,” he tells her, “I feel like that’s not actually any more helpful than it was when you said it to me a year ago, but — I don’t know, somehow it seems less impossible now, I guess.”

“That’s not weird,” Alice says, “that’s like my entire point.”

His dad is dead, and he’s not alone. It hurts so much, and he’s so lucky.

He futzes with the compass, concentrating on the magic it came out of the dirt with, prodding at it and questioning it and letting it move on him until he sorts out a way to connect to it that will cause it to light up if he’s aiming it at a magical adept, which seems kind of anticlimactically useless for any goal he might actually have but is kind of cool. He listens to Dylan and walks on the beach and thinks about his father making scrambled eggs, singing tunelessly — _To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free…_. He cooks brunch spreads for the house, playing with the magic, the excitement of connection, the thrill of learning it better, letting it take its most effective shape. He takes out the guitar and strums clumsily through the simplest possible versions of songs by the Beatles and James Taylor until his fingers ache, enjoying the chance to put his brain on a shelf while some alien and underdeveloped form of thinking comes to the fore, relishing the satisfaction of remembering to move before it’s already too late to do it smoothly. He watches the movie where Reese Witherspoon hikes the Pacific Crest Trail because her mom is dead and she’s fucked up her entire life and bawls his eyes out and feels refreshed afterwards, like a plant that’s been watered, and he goes to the library and checks out the book that it’s based on and reads it in bed, letting it fill him up. _I was no longer the woman with the hole in her heart_. He goes to yoga and to happy hour and to Book Club Marcia’s Fourth of July party where everyone starts one-upping each other with fireworks spells until his whole body is vibrating from the exuberant magic and he can’t stop laughing or casting off sparks.

He puts on LCD Soundsystem and goes for a run on a cloudy day with soft wind blowing when the air is pleasantly cool for June, and somewhere in there something shifts. He’s breathing heavy and his muscles are working but it doesn’t feel like dragging himself through every step. It feels hard and it feels good, endorphins or whatever, the breeze cooling the sweat on his face, forward motion is an effort but he doesn’t feel like he’s fighting gravity; it feels like something he can do, something he wants to do. He’s tired and he’s energized and he’s fucking alive, aware of every moving piece of his body, every slap of the pavement beneath his feet and every pull of his calves and his thighs, think of your legs like springs, his chest moving air in and out and heart pounding and the line of his spine, engage your core, his arms balancing the shape of him through space, don’t clench your fists, and he loves the trust of knowing he can keep going and the rhythm of his breath hard and steady and the music in his ears, that piano line skittering and charging like his heartbeat, like the blood rushing through his veins, like a runaway train, it feels so right that three miles comes and he keeps going, just a little longer, just through the end of the song, James Murphy singing like a wish or a prayer _if I could see all my friends tonight — if I could see all my friends tonight — if I could see all my friends tonight_ — And then the last drums stutter into echoing silence like an empty warehouse and he walks off the strain, waiting for his pulse to slow, and he thinks: well, what if? What if I could?

So the Saturday before his birthday Luisa helps him set out drinks and Toni makes actually really good vegan cupcakes and Nico will take any excuse to whip up a batch of weed brownies and Quentin is kind of nervous, waiting for the evening to start, but mostly he’s glad. Most of book club comes over, in shorts and those strappy dresses, bearing snacks; his friends from New York blip in, somehow looking uniformly overdressed despite the fact that all of them are wearing completely different things. Julia baked cinnamon chocolate chip cookies because baking is her latest project and she’s very proud; Eliot looks over his current outfit, featuring a shark-fin silhouette branded BEACHES BE CRAZY, and gives him one of those weird Eliot compliments that sound like he’s somehow making fun of Quentin and also genuinely into it at the same time, and Quentin rolls his eyes and smiles, because that’s one of his favorite Eliot things. Alice sidles up to Quentin at one point and asks with a particular knowing kindness he appreciates, “How are you feeling tonight?”

And Quentin looks around the room — Margo dazzling book club with her tips on how to rob a bank; Josh, possibly the only East Coast visitor to blend in, comparing indica strains with Nico; Kady listening to Ray and Toni reminisce about local hedge history while Penny hovers contentedly at her side — and says, “I’m feeling pretty great.”

“I’m glad,” Alice says, so sincerely that he pulls her into an impulsive hug and she stiffens, but only for a moment before she relaxes and squeezes him back.

Quentin turns twenty-eight a little groggy but not quite hungover, sitting by himself on the beach, wearing a tank top that says SUN DAY RUN DAY which Julia gave him as a joke gift because it makes him laugh but also because it’s Sunday and later he’s going for a run, listening to Feist and drinking a bottle of water to hydrate and because he should probably drink more water generally, for like. Health. He’s been thinking the past couple weeks that he should maybe do that kind of thing on purpose, maybe, make some choices more deliberately than just saying yes when Cynthia asks if he wants to go to the place with the giant salads a couple blocks away. He’s not in college anymore; he might need like, a bedtime. To floss. Ever since he started running Julia keeps telling him he needs to get a foam roller, whatever the fuck that is. He’s twenty-eight and somehow, without noticing when it happened, somewhere in all the crying and jogging and drinking and not drinking and reading and laughing and researching and listening, he started planning to stick around a lot longer than that. He should probably take care of the body he’ll be doing it in. His dad won’t be around to watch him do that, and it hurts but Quentin knows — his dad would be happy, if he knew. He watches the waves going in and out and thinks about how much he loved his dad and how much he misses him, two truths as huge as the ocean, and here he is afloat, smiling because it’s a nice day out and yesterday he saw his friends. In his ears a melody jangling like joy — _I feel it all, I feel it all…_

“Little magician!”

Quentin looks to the direction of the lilting voice, smile broadening. “Edine! Hey.”

She’s wearing her sealskin as a — bikini? Okay. She pads up to him across the sand, curls bouncing. “I’ve been hoping to see you — to thank you for your gift —”

“DId you like it?” he asks, pleased at her excitement.

“ _Oh!_ ” She places a hand across her heart and sighs, eyes fluttering briefly shut. “Oh, it’s _wonderful_ — such marvelous music — the tunes, the _passion_ — the ecstasy of the songs — my sisters and I give praise —”

“If you tell me which ones you liked,” he offers, “I can make another one with songs that are like those.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh — but they were all spectacular! The woman who dances on her own — she who seeks to run away — the one who is bulletproof — such joys have they brought us with their exquisite agonies!”

“Well I’m really glad,” says Quentin. “That was the point, so.”

She sits down on the sand beside him. “Magician — if I recall the positions of the heavens when first we met, today is the day of your solar return, is it not?”

“That’s right,” he says, oddly touched that she remembers.

“A day to which your kind ascribes much meaning,” she says. “Would it please you to honor the occasion by making the beast with two backs?”

Quentin laughs, because his life is so fucking weird, and sometimes that’s pretty okay. “Yeah, you know what? I think it would, if you’re up for it.”

She gives him an enticingly predatory smile.

And the sex is —

— it’s sort of like if —

— it makes him feel as though —

— nope, can’t do it. Words weren’t made for this. The best that comes to mind are things like: an acid trip at Six Flags on St. Patrick’s Day. Bathing in a tub full of electric eels. Being flayed alive but in a hot way. A Jefferson Airplane music video where no one is naked but everything is somehow obscene. She licks his balls with a tongue that feels almost spiked and somehow it feels incredible while also not feeling anything like sex; he makes a series of noises that sound like a dial-up browser logging on, or maybe like the Foley track for an old Warner Brothers cartoon. She pulses on his dick while he’s so hard his head feels legitimately faint singing that Cher song about believing in life after love, and he cries a little when he finally comes because he does. He believes in life and love, both. How the fuck did that happen.

When he can move his jaw again he says, “You really did like the music, huh.” His voice sounds like his larynx went through a meat grinder.

“It was magnificent,” she says dreamily. “Like the bard says — that super bass, that makes our hearts say —" She folds her hands against her chest and solemnly intones, "Boom badoom boom; boom badoom boom.”

Quentin shakes his head, smiling. That’s five songs in a row she’s mentioned that were all Eliot’s picks. God, he’s going to be so fucking smug about this. Quentin can’t wait to tell him.

*

He decides to start dating again.

It’s not like he’s desperate not to be alone, or whatever; he feels less alone than he ever has, actually, and that feels fucking miraculous. But it stays with him, the impulse he had at the wedding, resurfaces once the dust of his mourning has cleared — the sense that falling in love is something he might want to do again, someday. He used to be so embarrassed of how badly he wanted that, but now he thinks about Penny and Kady under the canopy and he can’t remember why. Quentin’s not expecting to fall head-over-heels like that anytime soon, but that’s okay. He has a lot of love already; he doesn’t mind waiting.

But he does think it might be good to — get out there, or whatever. Dip a toe in the water of finding someone nice to spend time with. Get used to the concept, and who knows? Maybe meet some cool people, have some decent sex along the way. Have — fun? It’s hard to imagine, but he’s done a lot of shit since coming back to life that would have been hard to imagine right up until the moment he was doing it, for worse and sometimes for better. Maybe he’ll surprise himself.

Plus, he’s never actually, like, done this before.

So he opens up Glindr for the first time in months because that’s how people meet now or whatever, deleting unseen a year’s accumulation of matches in San Diego, and deletes the shit he let Julia put in his bio about looking for a good time while he’s on the road. He types and erases about a dozen attempts to say _I want to meet someone cool and like maybe fall in love for whatever but no rush_ before deciding to let that come up organically, if he ever gets that far, and moving on to his interests. It’s kind of funny, reading the generically palatable interests Julia had selected for him — cooking, fitness, the outdoors — and remembering his intense skepticism at the idea of aligning himself with any of those things. It’s not like he would describe himself as particularly interested in them now, but like — yesterday he scrambled eggs for the whole house because he’s trying to master channeling the ambient precisely enough to cook them evenly, jogged four miles because it wasn’t too hot and Julia recommended adding a “long run” to his weekly schedule, just barely managed to graze his toes while folding over at the very end of yoga class, and cut across to walk home from the studio with Luisa along the beach. He really has surprised himself. It’s kind of neat.

He deletes them anyway, partly because leaving “fitness” in there seems like it implies some promises he’s not going to deliver on, partly because he’s still not looking to meet his soulmate right now, exactly, and he’s not planning to pledge his devotion to the first person to swipe right, but — whoever says yes, whatever they wind up doing together, Quentin wants them to meet a version of himself that’s real. After some thought, he goes with magical theory, access work, books. Kind of boring, but — there are worse things to be. He should fucking know.

After some hesitation, he sets his name to his initials — Q. M. Coldwater — figuring it’ll come up inevitably, and probably fast, but at least this will weed out the people who aren’t interested in anyone but the hero of the Seam. He considers putting a fake last name down, but decides that’s a lot to ask anyone to cope with on a second date, no matter how decent his reasoning. The profile picture he leaves as is; he looks decent there, which is too rare to dismiss.

There’s a part of him that kind of expects to be ignored without his name advertising the fact that he saved the world, but it turns out there are a decent number of people willing to swipe right on an okayish-looking somewhat nerdy potentially boring guy in his twenties. Quentin — sort of hates the relief that sets in as this clicks for him, like he should be above, what — wanting to be wanted? To be a person that could catch someone’s not quite indifferent eye? God, that’s embarrassing. But not so embarrassing that it washes out the pleasure of knowing that he’s got, like, options.

He goes to get a haircut, once he’s made some matches and exchanged some messages and set up his first — whatever it is. _Date_ feels a little strong for meeting someone for a drink he’s already decided not to sleep with right away as a preventative measure against his own hopefully dormant insanity. He kind of likes it long, because that’s what he’s used to, but he does the thing Margo said, asking for some layers, because in a couple days he’ll be drinking wine with a guy who seems pretty hot and fuck it, he wants to look as good as he can manage. If there’s an excuse for vanity, internet dating has got to be it, right? When the stylist is done Quentin examines his reflection in the mirror. The length is familiar; the shape of it is new, and he doesn’t understand how Margo knew this but it does seem more — flattering, or whatever. He looks like himself, he thinks; like himself, but a little bit better. Which — isn’t that kind of the whole point? Of the haircut, but also of like, his life.

*

Kevin is about Quentin’s height but built broad and sturdy; he has blonde hair and a deep tan and a friendly smile with appealingly crooked teeth, an unexpected flash of asymmetry that’s kind of a sweet distraction from his square-jawed handsomeness. They meet at the kind of bar which in New York Quentin would say was full of finance bros; he’s not sure if that’s a demographic that exists in San Diego, or what else all these loud twentysomethings in business wear do with their days.

“The ambience sucks,” Kevin says, which makes Quentin want to like him, “but it’s got the best whiskey in the city. The bartender is a hedge, I don’t know what the fuck he does to it and he’s not giving up his secrets — trust me, I’ve tried — but it’s unreal.”

“Good to know,” Quentin says, and orders accordingly. He’s not a big whiskey person, but hey — new experiences, right?

The whiskey is bizarrely good, a subtle range of tastes that shifts in his mouth as he swallows, and Kevin seems cool. Quentin’s a little anxious — he can’t shake the feeling that there’s some script he’s trying to follow that he’s never had a chance to read — but he’s not miserable, even if he can’t relax. Kevin’s got a boring job answering phones at a vet’s office, but he has a ton of shit going on outside work: surfing lessons on the weekends, experimental magic with his friends, a proudly terrible band in which he plays mediocre drums. They talk about the weird fun of playing an instrument poorly and the best seasons of Doctor Who. It’s going well, Quentin thinks, not like he’s racing to get on one knee but definitely like he could get drinks with this person again, and enjoy it, and maybe do other things besides; Kevin has a set of very deep dimples when he smiles, which seems to be most of the time. Quentin’s feeling pretty pleased with the outcome of — his first date, really, kind of ever.

Then Kevin says, in a voice Quentin recognizes, “So — Quentin Coldwater, I mean — is that Quentin Coldwater, like, _the_ Quentin Coldwater?”

Quentin — freezes. Like his reptile brain thinks if he just plays dead ha ha pun not intended god that’s dark Jesus Christ Coldwater calm the fuck down — like maybe this just won’t be happening, if he doesn’t engage.

— _It goes bad fast here._

Not taking the hint, not that Quentin has really given a hint to be taken, Kevin helpfully clarifies, “Like, you’re the guy that died at the Seam?”

“Uh — huh,” Quentin hears himself say. He’s trying very hard to keep his face from showing — anything.

“Damn,” Kevin says, shaking his head. “That’s crazy. You’re like a legit real-life action hero.”

“Mm,” Quentin manages. “I’m just gonna — I’ll be right back, okay? I’m —” He stands up, barely aware of the words in his mouth or the movement of his legs, and somehow finds his way to the bathroom and latches the door shut, feeling like he’s hovering above his body.

He splashes some water from the sink onto his face because — he doesn’t know why. To wake himself up, maybe, or remind himself that he’s here — “It’s fine,” he says out loud to his reflection. His features are swimming in front of him, like his face is an optical illusion he can’t get to work. It’s fine. He’s fine. He’s not going to — do anything stupid, or — he’s just going to go back out and get another round and smile and change the subject and they’ll keep talking and everything will be normal. Sure. Okay. Good plan. He can do this. “You can do this,” he says into the mirror, normally.

Quentin pats his face dry with a paper towel and opens the bathroom door and — yeah, he can’t do this. He sneaks around the edge, ducking his head slightly to hide in the crowd, feeling like he’s fleeing the scene of a crime.

*

When he gets home Luisa is sitting at the table, nibbling on a carrot stick and typing on her laptop. She looks up at him with a smile. “How was the date?”

“Oh,” Quentin says, coming over to sit next to her. He still feels kind of like his brain his been wrapped in gauze. “It was fine, until he asked me about my heroic death and I freaked right out of there without saying goodbye.”

Luisa winces. “Ouch. I’m sorry.” She pushes over her plate of vegetables and dip as a sympathetic offering.

“Thanks,” he says, taking a carrot stick and crunching down.

“Does it help to consider that maybe someone who’d ask that kind of shit on a first date isn’t someone you’d want to see again?” she asks. “I mean, it sucks, but maybe it’s kind of a screening mechanism.”

“Kind of?” Quentin rests his head in his hands with a sigh. “I don’t know. I mean, I feel like it’s possible for someone to be a decent person and still wonder about — whatever. I’d probably fucking wonder, if it wasn’t me. And then even if they don’t ask, the story’s so much bigger than me and people get so — hung up on it, or whatever, so it’s like, are they thinking about it? Are they not mentioning it on purpose? Which makes me feel deranged to even wonder about, but —” He reaches for a piece of celery. “It just sucks to feel like, I’m trying to actually move forward in my life, but I never know if someone is looking at me and just seeing — the guy that died. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think this through.” His prospects for love feel like they’re dimming fast. Or his prospects for getting laid, like, sometime before his forties. He’s not a saint. He wants that too. 

“Well, it’s a shitty situation,” she says, “but that part’s an objectively solvable problem.” He raises an eyebrow at her, not following. “Not thinking it through,” she explains. “Like you could just — do that. Figure out your worst case scenarios and make a plan, and then, when shit gets weird, it’ll suck but you’ll know what to do.”

Quentin considers this and finds it, horribly, a thoroughly reasonable suggestion. “I guess if you want to be like, a mature adult about it, or whatever,” he says, pulling a face, “yeah, you could do that.”

She laughs. “It’s your life, dude. I’m just saying — you’ve got options.”

He does have options. That was kind of the idea, here. “You’re right,” he admits. Bad news, but good news, too.

*

Margo shows up at the house towards the end of the month, surprising him while he’s reading through the collected poems of James Schuyler on the back porch.

“Margo,” he says, setting the book down and smiling up at her, “hey. What’s up? Can I get you a drink of water or something?”

“I’m good on that front.” She sits across from him, looking a little stressed. “I’m actually here to ask for something bigger.”

Quentin leans forward, listening. “Everything okay?”

“Considering that I’m trying to turn a magic kingdom into a functional democracy while we’re low on magic,” she says, “things are pretty fucking peachy. For the most part, credit where it’s due, Tick and Fen’s PR campaign seems to have majorly upped the general public’s understandings of the shortages issue, so at the very least I should be safe from getting deposed for something I didn’t fucking do. But no amount of wining and dining has managed to dislodge the stick from the ass of this bitch from the Fingerlings. She agreed to suspend her campaign, but she wants a magician to come to her islands full-time to keep things running smoothly. I told her, we don’t have the capacity, we Fillorians are all in this together, sacrifices must be made, blah fucking blah. I thought I was about to piss her off right back into declaring war, and if I’m being real with you a part of me kind of wanted an excuse to kick her ass for all the fucking migraines, but luckily for our new and improved international reputation, thanks to Josh’s research we were able to steer her towards another idea.”

Margo pauses, studying him briefly with narrowed eyes. “Apparently there’s this knife,” she goes on. “Been in the family for generations, passed on monarch to monarch. It’s supposedly an object of great magical power, consecrated in some deal with one of the questing creatures way the fuck back to give protection to the islands and their people. Could probably be used to keep things on the archipelago in tip-top shape. Only problem is, it’s been broken for a century — cracked in battle, I’m told, by a dishonorable ancestor. Sucks for them, but — we’re magicians, right? We’ve got options.”

“You offered to fix it,” Quentin says. He thinks he sees where this is going.

Margo’s lips curl into a smile. “There’s that fucking Ivy education. And Q, we have tried fucking everything. We’ve thrown at it every mending or repair spell any of us knows, we’ve gone through every book on the subject Alice can dig up for new ones, we’ve doubled up, tripled up, _quadrupled_ up on casting to amp up the power, we’ve called in every favor we’re owed — hell, Julia somehow got fucking _Fogg_ to take a crack at it, and none of it has done shit. This fucking phallic symbol doesn’t want to play nice. Shocker. But —” Margo tilts her head. “Josh thinks your cultivation spell might have more luck. Thinks maybe there’s something about the knife that resists the traditional mending style, but since your new shit comes at from a different direction, it might prove amenable. And look — I know you’ve got your whole fun in the sun rebrand that’s going really great for you, and I’m sorry to be interrupting, but Fingerbitch has her spear aimed at my twat and we’re in real last resort territory. So —”

“Margo,” Quentin says, a little sad at the way she’s asking, “of course I’ll help. Or — I mean, I don’t want oversell my skills here, it’s a new spell and kind of experimental still, and I can’t guarantee I can get it to work for something like this. But — I can try. I can definitely try.”

Margo meets his eyes, her face unchanged. “I wasn’t sure I could count on your assistance.”

He knows she’s not just talking about the knife. It hurts, a little, but — she’s here. She wasn’t sure, but she came anyway. That part is — good. “You can count on me,” he says. “I promise.”

“Okay.” She gives a slight nod.

“And, like —” Quentin fumbles with the words, feeling awkward but like it’s worth it, for her to know how much he means it. “You don’t have to apologize for — for interrupting my life, or — I mean, you are my life. Or — that sounded weird — you’re, you’re part of my life. If you want to be. I — we’re friends, right?”

Margo takes this in. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “We’re friends.” Then she smiles and it’s like — the High King lifts, a little. Quentin didn’t even know it was there, but suddenly it’s just — Margo. “The hair looks good, by the way.”

“Thanks for the advice.” Quentin rakes it out of his face, self-conscious. “And you know — not that it’s not good to see you, but in the future if you need something you can just — call, or whatever. You don’t have to come all the way out here.”

Margo shrugs. “T wasn’t busy. And — you know, I guess maybe I missed you, or whatever.”

Quentin knows that means a lot — from anyone, but especially from her. “Me too.” Then he frowns. “T?”

“Twenty-three’s apparently decided he’d rather sound like the bad boyfriend in a 90s teen movie than the latest iPhone model,” says Margo. “Go figure.”

“I guess that makes sense,” says Quentin. As much sense as anything about that situation. “So do you have the knife?”

Margo makes a _tch_ sound. “She doesn’t trust us enough to hand it over sight unseen. You’re going to need to stop by and pick her up in person. I’ll let you know when we manage to set up a date for it — honestly, I have got to find a way to get these people on fucking Google Cal.”

Quentin’s stomach flips unpleasantly at the thought of returning to Fillory, but — it’s for Margo, and also maybe Fillorian world peace. He can suck it up when the time comes. He sets that to the side for now. “Since you’re out here — do you want to stay, for a while? We could get a drink, or you could hang for dinner — I think Toni’s cooking something.” He waggles his eyebrows at her. “The one with the worms. If you’re not busy, I mean.”

“I’m never not busy,” Margo says with a roll of her eyes. “But those chucklefucks can live without me for an evening. And you don’t need to tempt me with the promise of an inexplicably hot older hippie.” She chews her lip. “I’d — I’d stay for you.”

Quentin smiles. “Well yeah, but — why choose, right?”

“A man after my own heart,” Margo says, sitting back, and Quentin’s not sure that’s true, but — it’s nice to hear it.

*

Luisa finally gets the globe back from her friend and they’re able to run some tests and confirm what they suspected: its detection mechanism is severely limited. Not quite just to classical spells or similar hedge variants; the best way Quentin can think of articulating the pattern they observe in what it responds to is that it picks up spells where the caster is working _on_ the magic, but is hit-or-miss for anything where the caster is channeling the magic _through_ the spell, with a lot of misses. Working together the two of them accidentally leave the entire house smelling like jacaranda for hours trying to see if there’s a level of power at which that one will show up, but no dice. And as far as they can tell, it doesn’t pick up collaborative magic at all.

“So it’s like we thought,” Quentin says to Julia on the phone. “Brakebills, and probably most if not all of the other schools, are missing tons of magical activity. And it’s not just a matter of keeping it exclusive to the highest levels of potential, or whatever — there’s magic that just doesn’t register, regardless of how strong it is.”

“Some of hedge networks must have pieced this together,” says Julia. “I mean, you said the compass picks up on the presence of an adept, right? Regardless of what they’re doing?”

“As far as I can tell,” says Quentin. “Although I don’t know if it did that before, or if that’s something I put in — the casting for that one was weird.”

“It would make sense, though,” she says. “When I was in the hedge scene at New York, most of them had never had any contact with the schools.”

Quentin flinches inwardly. He still feels guilty, thinking about the months he spent at Brakebills knowing he’d left Julia scrounging for the magic she deserved. About what happened to her there, but even before that — shame prickles the back of his neck, remembering the dingy bar he’d found her in, Eliot’s smug condescension and how quickly he’d latched on to it. But then something jumps at him in the memory. “The spells you learned with Marina and the rest — what kind of magic were they?”

“Standard hedge stuff, mostly,” she says. “Kind of a mix of home-brewed castings and school knock-offs. Marina kept the good shit under wraps for whoever she deemed worthy. A lot of it didn’t work right, or was a pain in the ass.”

“Right,” says Quentin, brain whirring. “And you’ve said, it wasn’t exactly the most supportive culture, right?” Julia laughs derisively. “So if someone got their hands on a copy of like, Popper Four, and they were having trouble with it — it’s not like the other hedges in that group would jump to their aid or whatever.”

“No, it was a pretty every-witch-for-themselves vibe,” says Julia. “Toxic, like Kady says. What are you thinking?”

He’s thinking — it’s there, he can _feel_ it, somewhere in the swarm of the hedge bar and Brakebills and what he’s learned about magic since — “Fogg says, he has that line about how hedges usually burn out, right?” He’s thinking out loud, reaching towards the glimmering edge of something, if he can just put the pieces together — “But, like, that’s such bullshit coming from him, because people burn out _at Brakebills_ all the fucking time, people lose their shit or fuck themselves up — and that’s just the accidents, your entire first term as a student is this series of winnowing points that they sell as some only-the-strong-survive shit, because — because magic is fucking hard, and the learning curve when you’re starting out is huge. Fuck, I got there and I spent my first couple weeks convinced I was gonna fail out because it took me forever to cast anything on purpose. And — and the first things I _could_ cast were, were shit like minor mendings, and I thought it was because they were just easy, but —”

“They’re not,” says Julia. “That was your discipline.”

“Yeah,” he says. He’s almost there, he thinks. Almost — “So — so what if part of what’s going on is — you get into Brakebills, or somewhere else, because you’ve already been taught magic that way, like Kady, or because something about that style comes naturally to you — it’s in your discipline, or it’s how things happen for you when shit goes south and instinct takes over — and if you’ve got potential and no one picks up on it, maybe it’s because your — your thing, your hook, it’s — somewhere else. It’s a different way of casting, of using power. But in a lot of places, like Marina’s old crowd, you’re still using institutional magic to learn. And the thing is — I mean, things were still hard, but it got so much easier for me, once I had a couple spells under my belt, that I could really do. Like it — opened things up. If I hadn’t been able to get over that hill —”

“And how can you get over that hill,” Julia says slowly, “if none of the magic you’re trying is the magic that would open things up for you?”

“Exactly,” he says, relieved. “And especially if the type of magic that would make it _click_ for you, that would really — turn you from someone with potential to a novice magician — if that’s magic that’s never been written down?”

“Shit,” says Julia. “So if we’re thinking about how to break the walls down and open magic the fuck up, like — there can’t be a one-size-fits-all solution, because magic doesn’t actually work like that.”

“No,” Quentin agrees. “Like, Luisa was talking about trying to start putting together — almost like a Wikipedia for hedge magic, or vernacular magic — trying to collect this knowledge that exists where people can use it. But — to really have an impact, we’d need more than that, right? For starters, ideally there’d be a way to bring people to it — the advantage of the sense magic the Brakebills globes use is that it works at a distance. The compass has a pretty small radius, and I’d have no idea where to even begin reverse engineering the magic in it to turn it into something that works remotely — it might not even be possible.”

“And then once people are there,” Julia says, picking up the thread, “you’d need — fuck, I feel like we’re just designing a school all over again, but you’d need teachers, right? Trying to learn on my own, when I was just starting out — it was rough.”

“I don’t know if I could have done it at all,” Quentin admits.

“But how do you get people teachers,” Julia muses, “without a school? We’re not looking to start our own institution — there are enough of them. But if not that, then — what?”

Quentin tries to think about it but hits static, like his brain has clocked out of ideas for the day. “I don’t know,” he says. “But — I’ll keep thinking.”

*

He is going to keep thinking about — access and magic and possibilities and connections. But it’s going on the backburner for a while, because he has a freaking date.

He has kind of a lot of dates, actually. After his aborted first attempt to test the waters, he took Luisa’s advice to heart and landed on the solution, embarrassingly simple in retrospect, of six simple words: I Don’t Like To Talk About It. Quick and undeniable, and reasonable enough, he thinks, that anyone who keeps pushing after that is probably a non-starter anyway. He practiced saying it to the mirror in his bedroom until he felt like he could deliver it in a calm, nonjudgmental yet definitive way, which made him feel stupid but seemed an embarrassing necessity for the goal of keeping things chill.

Once he felt like that was tucked safely in his arsenal, he decided — actually, maybe fuck a toe in the water. Maybe the way to get used to dating is to dive right in — see what’s out there for real, instead of sitting at home stressing about what might or might not work out. Most of them won’t work out; that’s like, life. But he feels like it might take the pressure off, to open multiple doors instead of brooding about whether he’s choosing the right one. To prove to himself that when he decided he had options, that was actually real.

With that in mind, he’d gone on a right-swiping marathon, trying to keep an open mind, and after a flurry of passably flirtatious questions and texts he tried to style as charmingly as possible he’d managed to line up for himself a whole bunch of dates, someone new to meet nearly every night for a couple weeks. There was a moment when he was exchanging messages about some girl’s Spock shirt that he had a weird attack of déjà vu, an echo washing over him of the weeks last year he’d spent chasing sex like shots of vodka, trying to blank out his mind by throwing his body at desire that wouldn’t ask for anything from him in the morning, and he paused, wondering if this was the same. If he was really opening up and trying new things, or if this was some perverse distraction from feeling fucked up about his dad’s death. A familiar tug-of-war between two impulses that each could be pointing towards living and each could be leading him somewhere worse, and maybe he’ll never know for sure how to read the signs, but he’s found some workarounds. He cupped his hands together, filled them with water to ground himself; drained them and filled them, again and again. In and out, calm and slow. Matching the rhythm of his breath. Tuning into the magic to remind him how to listen; and turning his attention then to his heart, asking it: what do you want? And — it didn’t feel like he was running from anything, into this. It didn’t feel like he was looking for anything except what he was likely to get: some new experiences and decent conversation, maybe a few connections worth exploring enough to turn into something more. It didn’t feel like he was trying to fill up a hole that needed space to heal. It felt small, and kind of boring; it felt like he was twenty-eight years old, and he’d been single for a while, and he wanted to see if he might meet someone new.

That seemed okay.

So he practices the haircare spells Margo passed on to him, and he uses magic to iron his better shirts, and he — goes out. Starts dating. Meets some people.

There are setbacks. People bring up the Seam and keep pushing when he tries as neutrally as possible to deflect, or get visibly disappointed that he doesn’t want to relive his moment of glorious martyrdom over smoked margaritas. He’s prepared for it, now, but — it stings, watching them lose interest when they realize he’s not going to play the part they’d been hoping to see. Like they’d wanted the guy that died, and they were disappointed someone else had shown up to the table. Quentin sits there, and manages to keep it polite until the end of the drink, and says goodbye without asking about anything beyond.

But it’s not all bad. Some people don’t mention it at all, and he knows for his own peace of mind he’ll have to broach the topic before much happens between them, but it’s kind of nice to feel like when that happens, it’ll be his choice. Others bring it up mildly or almost self-deprecatingly, like _Sorry, I just have to ask…_ , and when he brushes them off with a smile they apologize and move on. And he likes some of them — May-Lynne the teacher with the bubbly laugh, Joseph who plays the cello and volunteers with a neighborhood cleaning organization, Angel who reads his palm and loves the Strokes. He doesn’t go home with anyone yet, but he makes a few plans to meet up again soonish, and he’s grateful to the ones who are cool about the hero thing even when they don’t hit it off. Quentin feels himself relaxing with every hour someone shows interest in him, untouched by what he’s done — the way he talks about books, or a sarcastic line about the sequel trilogy, or the fact that he’s interested in magic, not just doing it but how it works. It’s not true love, but it’s something he maybe needed more, or first. Proof of concept: there’s something in him someone else might want to look at, besides his death.

*

“So in the end we went with the burgundy napkins,” Eliot says, wrapping up an accounting of the latest diplomatic dinner with the Floating Mountain, “and I think it was the right choice. Added the right level of drama to the proceedings, which were otherwise astonishingly dull.”

“Can’t have proceedings without drama,” Quentin teases. “Obviously.”

“I physically cannot,” says Eliot. “As you know.”

They’ve been talking regularly since Quentin was last in New York — mostly on Fridays, although sometimes if their text exchange lands on something one of them wants to respond to over the phone they’ll chat for a bit during the week. It’s funny; their conversations have been breezy, on the surface as light as they were before, but it feels — different, now. Quentin doesn’t feel that sense of some uncrossable gulf between the two of them, or between what he’s thinking and what he’s saying. It feels easy, and fun, and — close, even if they’re not, like, baring their souls. Quentin had kind of assumed that’s what he wanted, when he said he wanted to be Eliot’s friend, and he does eventually, but — it’s not like he confesses some deep dark secret to Julia every time they talk. Closeness is maybe more than that, actually.

“So what’s new with you?”

The first thing that pops into his head is his latest Glindr adventures, which — well, hmm. Quentin wants him and Eliot to be the kind of friends who can talk about that shit, but, as baffling as he continues to find Eliot’s late-game feelings swerve, it does remain the case that Quentin might have possibly sort of broken Eliot’s heart, more recently than Eliot broke his, and he doesn’t want to like, dredge up unpleasant memories, or poke at a tender spot that hasn’t had time to heal. But he doesn’t want to feel like he’s hiding anything from Eliot, either; it’s felt so good, picking up the phone and feeling that same freedom Eliot always opened up for him, way back when. And he thinks — they’ve survived a lot; they can survive an awkward conversation. So he asks, “Is it weird if I tell you I’ve started dating again?”

There’s a pause like Eliot’s thinking about it, which Quentin appreciates; he adds, “It’s okay if the answer is yes,” to make sure Eliot doesn’t feel, like, pressured or whatever. “Sorry if just asking made it weird.”

“I think it’s as weird as we make it, at this point,” Eliot says. “And I don’t — it’s not weird for me to hear about it, if it’s not weird for you to talk about it. I mean I want to hear about, you know. Your life.”

“That means a lot, El,” says Quentin. “And — not weird for me. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” He sounds sure. His eyes steady and bright.

Quentin smiles, relieved. “Well, in that case — I’ve started dating again.”

“How’s it going?”

“Pretty good?” Quentin considers. “I’m using Glindr, because I guess that’s like how people meet people now, and it’s — kind of weird. I’m still, like — some people I meet, and they just wanna talk to — this hero they think I am, which — that part’s kind of fucked up. And it’s fucked up also because — like a part of me can’t really blame them, you know? If me five years ago met someone who — did that, like, yeah, I’d probably be kind of obnoxious about it, too. So — it feels hypocritical, almost, to be — annoyed, or whatever, but…” He hesitates; when he brought up the topic he was expecting to tell Eliot about shit like the guy who was really into hitcoin (hedge witch bitcoin) and ordered a Diet Coke with a plastic straw he tucked into his backpack to take home. But that’s the thing about Eliot, right? The way being around him makes something Quentin doesn’t even know is there most of the time just — fall away. “I guess it’s like, half that I’m doing okay, but I’d still like to be able to go on a date without talking my fucking death, and then half that — I used to find that shit, like, flattering or whatever,” he goes on, ears burning, “and I don’t — I don’t like having to remember that I was like, that far up my own ass for a while. Which — that’s on me, you know?”

“I get that,” says Eliot. “I mean — god knows there’s some parts of my brand I wish I could erase from the halls of memory. But I think you’re being pretty hard on yourself, Q. It’s not like there’s a manual out there on the right way to deal with completely insane one-of-a-kind situations. And it seems like you’re handling it better than you were.”

“That’s a fucking understatement,” says Quentin. He thinks of Alice talking about forgiveness. How did he wind up with two exes who would keep on loving him so well after everything went to shit? “I keep thinking that my mom told me once they almost named me John, after her uncle, and then maybe I could have avoided some of this. Coldwater’s still sort of a giveaway, but — it’d be better than fucking Quentin.”

“You’re such a Quentin, though. It would have been all wrong.” Eliot sounds totally affronted by this imagined violation of some nonsensical principle. 

“Yeah, well.” He sighs, shaking off the unanticipated heaviness. “It’s not all bad, though. I’ve met some cool people. Nothing’s really clicked, like — you know, like _click_ -clicked, but — I’m seeing some of them again, so. It might.” He chews at his lip. “I’ve never really done this before.” His stomach is alight with nerves, he notices. Somehow this feels more — _more_ than anything else he’s said, even though — duh, obviously. Like he’s dragging to the surface all those embittered years of petty humiliations still lodged in him apparently like splinters in his skin. Or like by naming it he’s letting Eliot witness his gawky nineteen-year-old self. “I guess I kind of assumed for a long time I couldn’t, so it’s kind of nice to know I — can. I don’t know. Maybe that’s fucked up.”

“Why would that be fucked up?”

Quentin picks at his cuticle. “Because it’s like — some weird ego trip, or something.”

“It’s not a weird ego trip to want to be able to date people,” Eliot says with that kind of — half-exasperated patience he gets sometimes, which is annoying but in a way that makes Quentin smile, because it’s familiar. “That’s like, up there with liking chocolate and hating Boston on the list of near-universal human emotions.”

Quentin smiles. “So what about you? Are you — seeing people, or — or trying to?”

Eliot laughs at that, a big sincere laugh with no bitterness in it. “Who the fuck would I be seeing, Quentin? The talking raccoons?”

“Hey, I don’t judge,” says Quentin. “But like — you want to, right?” He hopes Eliot’s not still confused about wanting a fucking boyfriend. Like, if he is, his therapist is overcharging him.

“I do want to,” Eliot says, sounding thoughtful. There’s a pause where Quentin can almost see him going through the same process: considering what he’s about to reveal of himself, and deciding to let Quentin see. “I don’t know. It’s like — yeah, I’d like to — to be with someone, like that. But — I’m not in a rush, you know? I think — when I was younger I wanted it so much it kind of scared me, because I didn’t — I kind of didn’t really believe it could happen, for me. That someone could —” There’s a silence where Quentin’s heart aches, for the Eliot that thought he couldn’t be loved. “But now it seems — less impossible. Because… I guess it’s my turn to ask — is it weird if I tell you it’s because of — us?”

Quentin feels something warm and liquid spread through his chest. There’s a lump in his throat, but not like he’s sad — like he’s full. Full of the love they had, and the love they lost, and the love they’re building now. Of how much he wants Eliot to be happy, and how beautiful it is to think he’s been a part of that, in whatever way, even alongside everything else he’s done. “Not weird.”

“Good,” Eliot says softly. “So — so I still want it, but it doesn’t feel like — an emergency. And, like — I was talking about this with my therapist actually — there’s a lot, actually, that I want to — to have, or do, or figure out, for myself, in my life. It’s funny because I always thought I was so high-maintenance and I feel like I thought therapy was going to make me less that, and instead it’s like, wow, I had no idea.” Quentin smiles to himself. “And — honestly on that list romance, or whatever, is pretty low. Not in terms of importance, but like — priority-wise. So — you know, someday. But for now — I’ve got other things to do, and give my energy to. And I’m not — I’m not lonely, so. It doesn’t feel — bad, waiting.”

“That’s good,” says Quentin.

“And Margo and I, you know,” says Eliot, “have our thing, from time to time, so. It’s not like I’m celibate.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says wryly, “you’ve got one on me there. The closest I have is — remember the selkie I told you about?”

He can picture Eliot’s self-satisfied smirk as he says, “The one with the _flawless_ taste in music?”

God. He’s _so_ annoying. “You know, appealing to Celine Dion fans does not grant the bragging rights you think it does.”

“I’m sure the boys at Pitchfork would agree with you.” A beat, then in tones of incredulity Eliot says, “Wait, did you fuck a selkie?”

“Kind of?” Quentin says, laughter in his voice. He feels giddy, talking about this with Eliot, like they’ve fallen over some invisible line because they were laughing too hard to notice it was there. Like they don’t need it anymore. “Or, she fucked me, or — selkie sex is super weird. I honestly really recommend it, if you ever have a chance.”

“Uh huh,” Eliot says skeptically.

“Seriously,” Quentin says, “it’s not — like it doesn’t really feel like sex? It’s more like, what if your dick dropped acid. You feel really refreshed after.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Eliot, “should the opportunity ever present itself.”

“Anyway,” says Quentin, “so — that was kinda neat. But it’s not quite the same.”

“Well. I wish you luck in your endeavors,” Eliot says, arch; then, softer, adds, “Not that you need it.”

“Everyone needs luck,” Quentin says, thinking of Alice again, thinking he’s had so much luck but he still wants more. “But I appreciate it.”

*

“So, books,” says Serena, a tallish brunette around his age with straight hair fading to bleached near-white at the ends. “What are you reading?”

They’re at a bar downtown with burnished metal tables and an exposed brick wall, the kind of place where the menu is written in colorful chalk and the drinks are expensive but admittedly good; she’s holding a glass of something lavender, and it almost matches her nails. Quentin takes a moment to appreciate the novelty of being able to hear that question as just a question, instead of a test he’s probably about to fail, because the only test here is the one he’s set for himself — is he showing these people pieces of him that are real — and he’s been doing a pretty good job. He thinks briefly of what Eliot said, the way that having had something real once drained finding it again of its urgency, a bit, and like: yeah, maybe. Now that he’s really lived it — lived the love and the loss and the hurt and the unexpected joy of finding his way back to his friend — it does feel like that a bit. Like that love is still his, even if it doesn’t mean what it did.

“I’ve been rereading some James Schuyler,” he says. He hesitates; he’s never quite figured out the calculus on how much to explain about topics he objectively knows most people have never heard of, before they ask — where the line is between annoying them by acting like they know, and offending them by assuming they don’t. “He wrote poetry, mostly.”

Her lips curl wryly. “I know who James Schuyler is.”

“Wait, seriously?” he says automatically, then winces. “Sorry, that came out — wrong.”

“No,” she says, brow arched, “I’m feigning an interest in postwar American verse to try to score with a condescending twenty-eight-year-old who as far as I can tell is unemployed.” It doesn’t sound like an insult, though, in her husky voice; it sounds almost like an invitation. “He won the fucking Pulitzer.”

Quentin can’t stop himself from rolling his eyes. “Okay, but he’s not, like, O’Hara, or even Ashbery —”

“No, I know,” she says, mouth easing into a smile, “I’m dicking you around.” Quentin takes a drink, watching. “I love Schuyler.”

“Oh yeah?” he says.

She nods. “Hymn to Life is one of my all-time favorites. I did my senior thesis on the New York School.”

“No way,” Quentin says, leaning a little closer, “my favorite class in undergrad was about — not just them, we talked about the Beats too, and some others, but — I spent like a month obsessing over Ashbery for this paper. I thought about going to grad school for that, actually — or American lit, anyway.”

“Really?” she says. “What changed?”

He shrugs. “I dunno. It seemed a little — not frivolous, or — well, kind of, yeah, but — I don’t think that about other people. Just — so then I was thinking philosophy —”

“For the practicality,” she interjects, batting her eyes. “Definitely an upgrade.”

“Exactly,” he says, feeling himself smile, “and — you know, then I got recruited by Brakebills, and that kind of — fucked up all my plans, for a while.”

“I feel like magic has a way of doing that,” she says, wrinkling up her nose. She has freckles, Quentin notices, dark ones sprinkled across the center of her face. They’re cute. “Like every magician I know pretty much had a really fucked up couple years when they first got into it, whether they’re a hedge or classically trained.”

“Same,” says Quentin, “or — most of them, anyway. I’ve actually been talking about this with people — doesn’t it seem like there has to be a better way?”

“Totally,” she says, “but the people who’ve been in it are just so used to the way things are — I feel like the professors at Wingfern had this attitude almost of like, if you’re not miserable you’re not a real magician.”

“Oh man,” says Quentin, “so the dean at Brakebills, right —”

It’s like he forgets he’s on a date, after that; he forgets about her Glindr profiles or proving to himself he has options — proving anything at all. They trade stories of dysfunctional faculty members they’ve known, Brakebills South (“ _Antarctica?_ ” she says, “seriously? Like at that point it has to be so much cheaper to just fire him, it’s like an advertisement for how much they love creeps,” and Quentin throws his arms back in relief, “Okay, like, _as I’ve been saying_ —”) for the guy at her school who wasn’t allowed to have an office with a door for reasons constantly speculated upon but never conclusively identified (“But he was still department chair,” she says, and Quentin shakes his head, “It’s so fucking typical”); they talk access and institutions, theory and practice (“I moved here right after my master’s,” she says, “and it was just, like, _so_ obvious that the way people shit-talked hedge magic at Wingfern was based on nothing”); they talk books, and poems, and movies (“Like, are they well-made films? _No_ , of course not — but at least with the prequels you can see that Lucas had an _idea_ ,” he says, and she throws her head back and says, “Oh god, you’re one of _those_ ,” laughing). Serena’s smart, and funny, and she’s pissed off about a lot of things but she laughs easily, too, and talking with her doesn’t feel like he’s trying to get to know her, or trying to connect. It doesn’t feel like trying at all. At one point Quentin notices they finished their first drinks ages ago, and neither of them bothered to get up for another round.

“Shit,” she says, taking out her phone late into the evening when they’ve been there long enough that he’s fully sobered up but he still feels a little floaty. “I have to get going, I have work tomorrow — I wasn’t planning to stay out this late.” She ducks her gaze, like maybe she let something slip there she hadn’t been planning to say, and Quentin feels something warm stirring beneath his throat.

They walk to the edge of the block in the steamy August night, pausing at the corner where they’re headed in opposite directions. For a second Quentin considers offering to walk her home, but he doesn’t want to overstay his welcome. Instead he says, “I really had fun tonight. Can I see you again sometime?” He’s been saying that kind of a lot, lately, enjoying how easy it’s turned out to be to follow these particular motions, but he’s — nervous, this time. Not bad-nervous, just — fluttering in his stomach. He really wants her to say yes. “Maybe on a weekend, so nothing’s turning back into a pumpkin when the clock chimes?”

“I’m out of town this weekend,” Serena says, and Quentin doesn’t think it’s wishful thinking to hear a note of regret. “Bachelorette getaway for my best friend.”

“Weekend after, maybe?” He hopes it comes out light; he feels like he might be letting too much wanting show.

She purses her lips together for just a second. “That’s kind of a long time — maybe Wednesday? Next week?”

“I can do Wednesday,” he says. “I mean, I’m unemployed, so.”

“Right,” she says, a smile playing at her mouth. “So — text me. We’ll work something out.”

“I will,” he says.

They stand there on the street corner for a second, smiling inanely at each other in the darkness. Her eyes are dark brown and big and he thinks a little excited, maybe; he hopes so. He hopes that whatever she’s seeing on his face, she can read how glad he is, that she said yes to at least a little more.

God — it hits him like a fucking meteor — he really, really, really wants to kiss her. In a way he hasn’t wanted to kiss anyone in ages.

He doesn’t, there. But when he gets home, he cancels all his other dates.

*

He finally nails a spell to keep a stir-fry cooking at the ideal temperature after Toni catches him frowning at his pan at the stove before starting, hands spread wide as he feels out the channeling, and offers him an impromptu problem-solving session. Eating the results of his experiments with Luisa and Nico — it’s pretty good, actually — Quentin says, “See, like — I know a decent amount of magic, but even knowing what I wanted it would have taken me forever to figure it out if Toni weren’t really good at kitchen magic, and if she hadn’t helped me out. That’s what I’m talking about, when I say — it can’t just be the spells, part of opening access has to be about connecting magicians to magicians.”

“There has to be a way to get that to — like, to scale,” says Luisa. “Maybe not hugely, but — something more than total happenstance, but less formalized than a school.”

“Who would buy in?” says Nico. “Schools get people on their faculty by paying them.”

Luisa rolls her eyes. “People like helping people. Enough people that if we can find a way to tap into that, that could help a lot. And even besides that — it’s not like, totally selfless. You meet people, you expand your own network. Maybe you can do some kind of magical quid pro, like, I teach you some energy work, you double-check my herbalism.”

Quentin tries to imagine it — magicians spreading magic, the way some of them do only made easier to find, so people know it’s out there — so someone trying to learn magic can see what he didn’t know back at Brakebills: there are options. Then he laughs. “Guys — Glindr.”

Nico raises an eyebrow. “Hate to break it to you, but that is _not_ what that app is for.”

“No, not literally Glindr, but — but what do people do on Glindr?” he says. “They — put themselves out there, and they match with people who’ve also put themselves out there, because — because they both think the other person has something going on that they might want —”

“That’s one way to put it,” says Nico.

“And I’m saying — there could be something like that,” Quentin says, “to — to connect people. People could say, hey, this is what I’m good at, this is what I know, this is what I — what I feel like I could help with, and then they can look and see — who’s out there, that might be able to help with that.”

“I like where this is going,” says Luisa, “but — as a person who has fielded a _lot_ of unwanted dick pics in my life, how would we keep people from using it for creeping?”

“It could be small, to begin with,” Quentin says, thinking as he speaks, “like — like with us, and people we know, which — if we take it out to people _they_ know, that’s a lot of people already — I mean it’s not going to like, revolutionize the world overnight. It would take time if we wanted it to spread through — word of mouth, and if we wanted anyone offering help to be someone we’d checked in with, right — but it would be a start. Wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” Luisa says consideringly.

She tilts her head and opens her eyes wide at Nico, and he sighs and says, “You people are gonna kill me. Yeah, I can get something like that up for you.”

“Because you love to be helpful?” she says, grinning.

“Because you’re going to be a pain in my ass if I say no,” he says, but there’s a gruff smile on his face. “Gimme a couple weeks, though, I got a ton of client work right now.”

“I don’t know when I’d have time to start doing any kind of outreach, anyway,” Luisa says. “I mean I can talk to friends of mine, but — if we want to really have conversations about what people are up for, and what they want to contribute, like, it’s the busiest time of year for me at work, and that’s not gonna change for a while.”

“I can start — making some calls,” Quentin hears himself say.

Luisa looks at him. “Yeah?”

He shrugs, briefly uncertain. He hadn’t really seen himself getting involved in this way, or to this degree, but — “Yeah, why not? I can call Kady, she’d probably have a list of people it’d be worth talking with to — gauge their interest, figure out their skillsets. And like —” He grins, feeling excitement start to brew. “I’m unemployed. I could use a project.”

*

Quentin did meet up with Serena for drinks on Wednesday, as much fun as the first time, and made plans quickly after to meet up again Saturday, for dinner this time, at some locavore farm-to-table place she likes. It’s easy with her, that bright, sparkling, talking into the night feeling where the conversation felt like a game they’re winning together, so easy that he takes a moment to be grateful to his romantic past because he’s honestly not sure that his younger self could have recognized as that particular longing something this light, gently spiked around the edges only because he’s so eager for more. Serena’s a naturalist, working at the greenhouse at Brooktree, a small local magic college; in her spare time she writes, short stories mostly although lately she’s started toying with the idea of a book, something she discloses with a hint of bashfulness that makes Quentin think not everyone gets to hear about it. Besides the New York School, she likes Marianne Moore and Gwendolyn Brooks; she reads mostly contemporary fiction but tries to make room each year for one gigantic classic. This year it was _The Brothers Karamazov_ , which makes Quentin grin.

“Oh shit, I love that book,” he says. “I read it for a class expecting it to be a huge pain in the ass, but it’s so, like — fun? I mean I know that’s a weird thing to say about a Russian novel that’s about like, theology and patricide and morality and like the ideological currents of nineteenth century Russia —”

“No, but it is,” she says, “it’s so — dramatic. I thought the same, that it was going to be a slog, like this big tome where people just sit around discussing philosophy or whatever, and you have that but then you have these like, pages and pages of scandals and betrayals and people drinking vodka and screaming at each other. And then it’s weirdly kind of sweet, too.”

“I cried when I read it,” he admits. “I’d stayed up all night because I was behind on homework, but — still. I should pick it up again, see how it feels now. I haven’t read it since college and I like, _way_ overidentified with Ivan at the time.”

Serena studies him, thoughtful. “And you don’t now?”

Quentin thinks about the middle brother: his bitterness, his guilt. His soft heart burying itself in nihilism, so wounded by the ugliness of the world he could see no option but to reject the world entirely. His madness and the devil his mind created to torment him by displaying his own worst fears of what he was. “I don’t think I do.”

After dinner they head out into the late summer night, ambling towards the place their paths home will diverge until they stop at the corner that will split them.

“So…” says Quentin. He doesn’t want it to be over. He’s taken so many people home by now, but — this he’s never really done. He remembers suddenly telling Luisa about the Eliot thing, ages ago, how she’d inquired whether Quentin had, like, asked him out — no; not then, not ever.

She looks into his face, lips pursed into a funny half-smile. She’s a couple inches taller than he is; he hopes she doesn’t mind. “So, okay,” she says. She takes a deep breath in through her nose, like she’s steeling herself. “Three nights is kind of when I try to rip off this awkward band-aid, so — historically, when I’ve tried to get specific about things early on, it hasn’t gone great for me. Like, I’ll say I’m cool with whatever and then not be cool, or I’ll jump right into being the girlfriend and then, surprise, not so much. These days I’m trying to just — not jump to conclusions, and instead really stay honest with myself and with whoever I’m meeting about where I’m at. And where I’m at with you is — I like you. A lot.” Quentin feels a smile flickering onto his face, and she reflects it back at him. “I’d like to keep seeing you. And like — I’m probably not going to be able to do the whole oh-we’re-not-labeling-it thing indefinitely. I’ve played that game before, and it doesn’t work. So at some point, I’m going to need to define things, but — I’m not ready for that yet, and I can’t give you like, a timeline on when that’s going to be. In the meantime, I’m not seeing anyone else, and if you’re seeing other people, like, I don’t want to hear about it? But I get it, if — if you’re like, not ready to skip to monogamy while I’m still emotionally — where I’m at, commitment-wise. That doesn’t bother me. So — that’s where things are, for me.”

She looks at him expectantly. Quentin stares at her, trying to process what she said, and he must take too long because an unfamiliar self-consciousness shadows her face and she says, “Sorry, I know — I know I can kind of come on strong with stuff like this, it’s just my style, I didn’t mean to —”

Quentin shakes himself. “No — no, it’s fine, I’m just —” He gives a little laugh. “This is just like, already maybe the most mature conversation I’ve ever had about relationships, so, uh — it’s new territory for me, but also — you know, kudos for that.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, crossing her arms. “I decided a while ago that I’d rather scare guys off than keep putting up with grown-ass men who refused to act like fucking adults, so — I try. I guess.”

“Wow, we really would not have gotten along when I was in college,” he says, and he can see her posture ease slightly, at that. “No, hey, I — I like you, too. A lot. And I’m — kind of in the same boat, I guess. I’m not — I’m not looking to jump into things, but I’m also not, like — this isn’t nothing, for me. And for what it’s worth — I was seeing other people, pretty much right up until the second I met you, so.” He gives an uncertain shrug.

“So,” she says, and she’s smirking a little at him in the scattered lights of the city street. “What do you want to do now?”

“Honestly?”

“Always,” she says. “Please. That’s like, my one rule.”

Quentin considers, listening to — the flutter of his pulse. The unmistakable clarity of his wish. “I really want to kiss you.”

Her lips part for just a second into the sweetest little smile, one that he immediately tucks away to look forward to seeing again. Then they’re leaning into each other, mouths meeting soft, warm; resting for a second at the moment of touch like they’re confirming what’s happening. He starts to move slowly against her lips, his entire body flushing hot at the slightest yielding of her mouth, her tongue slipping gently against his, this shared gesture that’s almost nothing compared to so many of the things his body has done but lights him all the way up because every single part of him is here to feel it. He slips a hand to the back of her neck; she curls her fingers into his empty hand at their side.

Serena breaks the kiss, drawing back slightly. “Okay. Your turn to ask me.”

A little dazed he says, “What do you want?”

She tightens her grip on his hand, and Quentin’s heart kicks a hello as she says, “I want to take you home.”

*

Serena lives in a two-bedroom shared with an Illusionist in Balboa Park; by the time they get there, holding hands and sharing furtive smiles in the back of an Uber like they’re doing something secret, Quentin’s not exactly attending to the decor. The ride over, the slightest touch of skin on skin with the promise of more to come, gave his body time to wake up to what’s happening, what he’s about to be allowed to feel. To realize, palpable and clear as the ambient when he’s listening — he wants this. Even more than he thought he did.

And it’s like — this part, right, the way they fall into each other just past her bedroom door, the solid curve of her waist comfortable beneath his hands ready to explore, the heat of her eager mouth working against his and along his neck with a quickness that makes his knees weak to feel her kissing wetly against his skin, pulling at his collar to push further along, and wonder with a rush of embarrassed warmth if she was thinking about this in the car, if she really wants this as badly as he does, and he wants it so badly — he wanted this. Wanted the press of her breasts against his body, the stutter in her breath as he turns his head to the side to nip gently at her ear, and her hands at his hips pulling him in so there’s no mistaking the welcome she’s offering as he holds the closeness there, starting to stiffen up with the heat and the touch.

But he wanted the rest of it, too: the moment he leans forward and she steps backward and stumbles and cries “Oh shit,” laughing, stooping to kick off her strappy sandals while he takes the opportunity to slip out of his Converse and she sees them and says, “Do you just like, not have any other shoes,” ahd he says “I do, but those are legitimately my nicest ones,” and she says “Jesus” in this tone of ebullient disdain and then abandons the conversation to kiss him deep, one hand at the side of his face. How he’s so turned on he can’t think in sentences but in the microseconds between kisses these smiles keep escaping him, and he can see his own delight mirrored on her face. The way he slides his hand up the smooth skin of her back while she gasps into his mouth and also the way he fumbles uselessly at the edge of her bra for a second before she shows mercy on him and says “It’s a pullover, I can’t fucking stand underwire —” and starts getting at the buttons on her shirt. He wanted all these interstitial nothings — he wants all of it: to fuck her and to kiss her and to hear her laugh and to hold her hand. It feels like a long time since he’s wanted each of those things. A long time since all the requisite pieces of him were open to wanting like this.

She pulls her shirt off and the bra right after, and she gives him a flirtatious little smirk when she catches whatever wildly undignified thing is happening on his face at the sight of her bare chest. She doesn’t shave under her arms, he notices, and then for a second he feels sexist for noticing, but — whatever, most girls — women — do; it’s not a crime to have, like, pattern recognition skills. It’s not like he cares; maybe he finds it a little hot, the — like, the full _bodiedness_ there, where he wasn’t expecting to see it. Then she falls back onto her bed, edging her body up to make room, and he climbs into it on top of her, yanking off his shirt, feeling like he’s diving after her into some clear bottomless pool when he presses his body down to kiss her, hard and hungry, her mouth and her neck and the space beneath her clavicle and her breasts, lingering to graze at her nipple when it makes her moan.

“You’re hotter in real life,” she says breathlessly.

Quentin laughs. “What?”

“Your profile pic,” she says, “I thought, oh, he’s cute — then I met you and it was like —” She lifts herself up, maneuvers them so that he’s on her back and she’s straddling him, smoothing her hands along his ribs; he shivers a little, not unpleasantly, under her gaze. “Like, _fuck_.” She lowers herself to grind against his hard-on, and for a second he tilts his head back groaning, too clouded with arousal to do anything but feel. Serena brings a hand to the side of his face, tucks strand of hair behind his ear and stills at his cheek; impulsively he turns his head and licks at her thumb, hissing when she hooks it into his mouth for him to suck at while she gives a throaty laugh. “It’s the way your face moves, I think,” she says, “there’s something really — alive about it.”

Quentin — could maybe cry a little, to hear that, to believe it even, but he doesn’t. Not right now.

Instead he turns his face back to her, admiring the breadth of her shoulders, her tits hanging above him as she leans over, the arc of her hips into her jeans where she’s still working against his dick, and says, “I sort of suck at giving compliments, but — I feel like I’m about to pass out just looking at you, so —”

She bites back a pleased smile, then stoops over to kiss him, long and thoroughly, sighing when he runs his hands along her back; kisses his jaw, his neck, down the midline of his chest, planting kisses a little faster than slow, like she’s trying to tease him but too impatient to really manage it, which — _Christ_ — kind of works to the same effect, leaving him lightheaded with anticipation by the time she’s mouthing at the spot beneath his belly button while her hands undo his belt, his button, his — “Ohfuck,” he whispers — zipper, all the way down. He lifts his hips and helps her with the awkward wriggling out of his pants, his boxers; she resumes her place above his legs and hovers with her face just above the head of his cock, bobbing red and thick and aching with want, and she flicks up her eyes at him for just a second, somewhere between coy and a little actually shy, and there’s that sense again — that sense that whatever they’re doing, whatever this becomes, she’s in it just like he is; the sense that everything happening in this room tonight is real. It’s a thought that coats him top to toe.

Then she takes the head into her mouth, softly, swirling it a few times with her tongue; Quentin makes a sharp unexpected noise at the contact. A minute longer there, and this _is_ a fucking tease; he finds himself fisting her bedsheets, trying to contain his own eagerness until she — _fuck_ — abruptly shifts course to take him in _deep_ , lips a firm ring down at the base of him, one hand circling firm the slight gap below, and that’s good, that’s so good he’s breathing hard, watching his own stomach work up and down while she starts moving her mouth up and down, slick and certain, sending waves of sensation reverberating through all of him. He rests a hand at the back of her head to touch her where he can, just to enjoy the feel of her straight soft hair, this one simple sweetness in the middle of the fucking thunderstorm in his body, and he’s trying, like he’s _really_ trying to have good blow job manners while his abdomen tenses with the pull of her mouth and she takes a break from pumping up and down to suck delicately at his balls while he starts saying without thinking “Yeah — yeah — please — yeah,” but then she’s back on his cock going hard, speeding up, the back of her mouth scraping against him like _that_ , and his hips buck up into her mouth of their own accord, which she doesn’t seem to mind but in fact takes as like encouragement, and — for just a second he lets himself sink into how ridiculously fucking good it would feel to do exactly what he’s about to do if she doesn’t stop, which — fuck — but that’s not actually how he wants this particular evening to go. So he props himself up on his elbows and manages to get out, “Hey — hey, come here, come up here —”

Serena lifts her head, still gripping his dick, looking a little unsure. “Is this —”

“This is fucking _great_ , are you kidding me? Just — here —” Quentin leans forward to pull at her chin and she lets herself follow, laying down to kiss him while he runs his hands all over her delicious body, touching her sides, her arms, the small of her back. He slips his hands between them to undo her jeans, having more luck thank God he did with the bra, tugging at the denim and the soft stretchy fabric beneath. “I want — can I —” He pants a laugh because he’s not feeling shy — he’s a million miles away from that — his brain is just too scrambled to get the words out.

“Yeah,” she whispers, mercifully, and swings her legs off him to finish undressing, a sight that hits him so hard part of him wants to tell her to forget what he said so he can just lay back and get a better look at her long, muscular legs. He’s expecting her to lay on her back then, but instead she — yes, _please_ — kneels astride him once more and makes her way up his body until she’s spreading her cunt above his face. “Is this what you wanted?”

“Better,” he breathes, and she presses herself against him, red and hot.

And holy _shit_ , he just about blanks out with how much he loves it here: the salt taste and the smell filling his nose, the soft prickling of her bush and below that her wet mess smearing across his face as he licks at her clit, adjusts the angle a little when she tells him “Not right on — a little above, like — _fuck_ , like that,” her wild breathing as her body responds to his touch. Her ass rounding out against his hands, fingers digging in, and the sense of his entire self exposed beneath her, cock still heavy and hard, so much it hurts but it feels good, too. To feel his own wanting.

“Can we,” she starts, and he moves to slip a finger inside her, just to hear her stop mid-sentence with a choked-off sigh. Then she pulls herself together to say, “Can we fuck already, because I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve been wanting to fuck you all week —”

“Jesus,” he says, brain shorting as he lets her go, “we — uh, I can —”

She laughs, getting off him. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

He sits up to kiss her, tensing when he realizes he’s forgotten where his mouth just was, he’s had people get weird about that, but she sucks at his bottom lip eagerly and he relaxes, stroking her face. “You might want to be careful about saying that kind of thing to me,” he says, his mouth running now into overdrive, spitting out what he’s too overheated to worry about taking back, while his body follows her cues as she lies back down, eyes never leaving his face, “it’ll go to my head —”

“What,” she says, jumping on this like she likes the power she sees there and the fact that she’s playing it up doesn’t make it any less hot, “that I’ve been thinking about it? Waiting for you? Wondering if you fucked as good as you looked?”

Quentin tries to answer, says instead “ _Nnhgghh?_ ” because the words and way she’s looking at him have redirected the blood flow firmly away from his brain; manages, setting his dick against her pubic bone, to say, “Something like that.”

Her lips curl into a smile. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They have the standard conversation about protection spells (“I’m running Harper’s,” she says, “re-up it once a month just to be sure,” and he says “Oh same, actually,”), and then he’s working his way into her, pushing into that slick tight heat, already wet with a little more from her magic, watching her face as he moves slowly into her tension, pulling back halfway and feeling that give as she opens up for him, as he slips through, _all_ the way in, fuck — starting to thrust, slowly, finding a rhythm that works for her, for them, and then he must find the right angle because her face twists open and she makes a low earthy sound he wants to taste. He starts fucking her in earnest then, building speed as her hips rise to meet his, as her breath comes heavy and her cries get loud, and he’s making noise too, sounds it’s been so long since anyone pulled out of him, these ugly little gasps that feel like a gift.

“So — _fuck_ ,” he groans, his whole body tight and getting tighter as he gets closer, trying to hold out, entranced by her mouth open beneath him and his sweat dripping onto her skin, half-shocked somehow by the words coming out of his mouth, “so what’s the verdict? Do I fuck like you were hoping, all week long?”

“Better,” she gasps, and it’s the right move to play but she’s looking at him wild-eyed like she fucking means it, and he’s far gone enough to love even the trace of embarrassment that runs down his spine at how much he likes that. Then she hikes one leg over to the side and sends him back on his knees and that shifts the angle tighter, deeper, and she’s fucking yelling for it now, which is good because he’s slipping past the point where he can keep track of anything but what his body needs, pounding into her rough and desperate, blacking out everything but how fucking good she feels on him and how fucking much she wants him until with a final rough push he comes inside her, collapsing against her as he rides his orgasm out, feeling the fading pulses where they meet.

He pulls out of her and flops on his back by her side, breathing hard with sweat cooling the skin of his chest. “Holy shit.”

“Uh huh,” she says besides him.

He rolls onto his side to look at her. “Are you — like are you good? Because if not I can — whatever you want —” He’s pretty sure she came, or at least pretty sure he felt her clenching around his dick at the end there, but he was overwhelmed enough that — like, it never hurts to check.

Serena laughs, loud and bright. He likes that sound. “I’m good. Definite brownie points for asking, but I’m very good.”

“Okay cool,” he says, “because I’m not actually sure I can move more than —” He reaches an arm across her body and leaves it awkwardly suspended there, suddenly feeling shy about what’s allowed — this part he hasn’t done much. He doesn’t know the rules. But he wants — like, yeah, he wants to fucking cuddle.

She smiles at him. “Gimme a sec,” she says, “I’ll be right back, okay?”

Quentin nods at her, content, and watches her stand up, take a robe off a hook by her closet, and shrug it on before padding out into the rest of the apartment. While he waits for her to return, he dematerializes the mess on the sheets and lies back, feeling the pleasant sleepiness start to wash over him, feeling fucked out and kind of starry-eyed and more than a little pleased with himself. He can do this, he thinks — not just the sex, even, the other stuff too. The stuff he didn’t even let himself know he missed, he was running so hard from the truth of his heart. His heart is still and maybe always bruised and weary and thick with the memory of its own ugliest edges, but — he can do this, too.

It’s not until Serena has slipped herself back into bed, curled to spoon against him with her back to his chest, that he realizes: he’s never asked her about the Seam. He got so swept up in liking someone new, he forgot completely. He forgot that he was the guy that died.

Quentin deliberates bringing it up. If this were a one-night stand, he could let it go — appreciate the distraction and move on, safe in the belief that it didn’t matter what she knew. But he doesn’t want this to be a one-night stand. And he knows — he knows he has to ask, if he’s going to see her again. He has to make sure this is real. He thinks it is, but — he needs to know. He’s figured out that much, at least.

And if it’s not — his stomach squirms at the prospect — if he’s been wrong, then that — sucks, for him. But — he thinks he’s not sorry, actually. He’s not sorry he said yes, with every part of him, to something that seemed good.

“Can I ask you a question,” he says, “that might sound super weird?”

Serena rolls over to face him, props her head up on her hands. “I don’t necessarily promise an answer, but — sure thing.”

“Did you —” He hesitates, trying to think of how to phrase it. “When we were messaging, and I told you my name — did that ring any bells?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Bells like, that sure sounds like that guy who did that thing at the edge of the universe?”

Quentin swallows. “Yeah. Like that.”

“I mean — yeah?” She shrugs one shoulder. “So that was you?”

“It was,” he says. “Did you — like, would you have — is that why you said yes? When I asked if you wanted to meet?”

“I can’t, like, run a simulation and see what I would have done in a universe without it,” she says. “But — I told you. I saw your picture and I thought, he’s cute. You like books and theory, and you got through like ten messages without saying anything idiotic or creepy. That puts you at like, ninety-fifth percentile from the get-go, at _least_. It’s hard for me to imagine I wouldn’t have given you a chance.”

He appreciates the thoroughness of her honesty. Better than an assurance of something she couldn’t guarantee. He can’t guarantee it, either — where he’d be right now, without that. “My friend Julia always says that for guys trying to date women, the bar is like, on the ground. Because of how men are terrible.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” says Serena, authentic exasperation in her voice. “The stories I could fucking tell you.” She slides a hand down his arm, finds his fingers to latch on to.

Quentin smiles, bringing their hands to rest between them. “Sorry for the awkward question. People get — I don’t know. weird about it.”

“What,” she says, “is it like everywhere you go people are dying to hook up with the guy who saved the world?” She winces. “Sorry — unfortunate pun not intended.”

He gives a rueful laugh. “It’s fine. And yeah — actually it’s exactly like that.”

She makes a face. “Ugh. People are gross.”

“I mean —” He shrugs. “It was kinda fun for a while, I’m not gonna lie. But —” He shifts to lie on his back, thinking — about sex, and his life, and Ivan Karamazov. She rests her head against his chest and he strokes her hair. How could he have ever thought, Quentin wonders, that he didn’t want this. “I don’t know,” he says finally. “I guess I wanted — to move past that. Or at least to believe I could.” He’s saying a lot, he thinks, for a third date. But — he kind of doesn’t have a choice, about this one. And — she doesn’t seem to mind.

Serena says, “And now you have?”

Quentin kisses the top of her head. “I think so,” he says. “I’m working on it, anyway.”

*

So they’re maybe not official, and he’s maybe not in love, and he’s trying not to make predictions but he thinks he can see the shape of the path he’s treading and it’s a path that leads somewhere good. He can feel the pull of it, each time he sees her, like the soft glow of light on the ground leading to a barely open door; he can feel his heart falling like a feather, a slow gentle drift, and it’s good to be here. It’s good to know he doesn’t need this to become anything it might not, and to feel anyway that he wants it to, and he’s not sorry. His pulse skips pleasantly when she slips her hand into his walking through the photography museum near her place; they eat take-out half-naked at her dining room table after sex when her roommate’s not home. She makes him laugh with her opinions on male novelists; he makes her come with his face between her legs, loud and grateful and deep. They don’t define things; he’s not in any hurry. He’s having fun. But like, really though. It’s kind of wild.

Rishi moves back to the house in the first week of September, and there’s a second when he calls over from the back and waves up at Quentin and Cynthia on the porch that Quentin worries things are going to be awkward between them, because of the sex. But Rishi bounds up the porch steps and greets first Cynthia then Quentin with a warm and sincere and unmistakably platonic hug, and his worry dissolves so quickly he feels stupid for having felt it. They throw a party half to celebrate his return, half just because. Quentin invites Serena, a little nervous before he asks, differently nervous after she says yes; he invites his New York friends, too. The Fillory crew send their regrets along with difficult to parse summaries of some under-control but highly time sensitive situation having to do with shortages and fairy politics and some conflict to the North, but Quentin gets to catch up with Alice about work and start talking to Kady about who might be interested in offering time to help magic grow, and get her ideas on the best ways to approach people. Julia manages predictably to steer Serena into a corner for some reconnaissance; Quentin rolls his eyes with a sense of inevitability when he sees them talking, but when Julia slips into place beside him later and tells him, “Serena seems really cool,” he smiles.

They talk at book club about what they have to offer, and what it is people might want to know; Quentin starts keeping a file of notes to keep straight names and contact info, interests and skills, questions it seems useful to ask, categories of magic they can group spells by after Marcia points out a lot of people might have more to give than they realize, if they don’t think of what they do as anything much. Kady sends him people from her network to get in touch with, witches and magicians connected locally to their kind, hubs of hedge activity to reach out to, and he sends emails, makes some calls; Penny offers to Travel with him once he starts getting some meetings set up, and Quentin can’t believe he’s kind of looking forward to that.

He runs in the evenings, when the September heat has cooled, and he doesn’t know how it happened but it’s like after more than a year of forcing himself through it his body has finally given up its protests and it’s still hard and he’s still slow but he mostly doesn’t hate it once he gets through the first mile, and sometimes it feels fucking good, to breathe hard and sweat and work too hard to think past the pavement and the breeze and Julian Casablancas's frank voice singing fuzzily in his ears. To have a body that’s alive enough to ache a little. Every now and then he’ll check the app at the end of his run and be pleasantly surprised by his time. He’s adding to his weekly mileage, bit by bit, like the running websites Julia sent him recommend, and up to five miles on Saturdays now, longer than he ever would have thought himself capable of staying in motion, but he never worries about making to the end; he knows he can do it, as long as he wants to.

He messes around with buckwheat pancakes and, yeah, berry compote, using magic suggestions from Toni and Ray and ingredient suggestions from the comments on the recipe page of this one cooking blogger in Montana with like seven kids. He plays the three chords for Love Me Do on the guitar all the way through basically as fast as it’s supposed to go, enough times that he can sing badly along without getting distracted and fucking up a transition, and then he starts looking around for something else to learn. He reads Schuyler on the back porch, relishing the words of Hymn to Life: _What kind of a tree / Is that? I love to see it resurrect itself, the enfolded buttons / Of needles studying the branches, then opening into little bursts._ He checks his inbox one day and he’s got an email from the _Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ saying that his article has been accepted for publication pending edits about which someone will be in touch shortly and he feels like his heart has vacated his chest and left behind a glowing sun, and he reads it again feeling like his heart is slamming back into place and turning the volume up to throw a fucking party, and he wishes so badly he could tell his dad but Luisa buys him a drink and Serena gives him a kiss and Julia sends him a selfie of her grinning face and Eliot says _That’s amazing, Q_ , sounding so thrilled and impressed it makes Quentin blush.

Things aren’t perfect, but they’re good; he likes where he’s at, he’s pretty sure he wants to get to where he’s heading. And then he wakes up one morning to a text from Margo reading, _I hope you’re free this weekend, because their fucking lunar festival is finally over and the Fingerlings have finally agreed to sit down and talk_ , and Quentin feels like he’s been dunked in ice water, because apparently the next place he’s headed is Fillory, and it turns out he wasn’t ready at all for that to be real.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning in the end notes.

The first thing he notices is the magic. It’s louder in Fillory — louder and less clean, crowded with thicker strains competing with each other, lines spiked and unruly. A swirling cacophony compared to Earth’s tidy stream, like an orchestra where every musician is playing a different piece. Quentin doesn’t know how he’s never noticed it before; it jabs at his edges so adamantly he has to consciously turn his awareness off.

The second thing he notices is the thought: _I wish I were fucking dead_. Immediate, visceral. He doesn’t mean it — it’s less a sincere wish than his automatic shorthand, still, for this specific clenched-fist full-body awfulness, like an unwieldy vestigial limb — but it still sucks, hearing that voice in his head again. He’d gotten kind of used to living without it.

Fuck Fillory, man.

Margo greets him with a quick hug before thrusting a set of clothes into his arms. “You’ll need to put this on,” she says. “The Fingerlings are big on ceremony. What shoes are you wearing?” She glances down at his Converse to answer her own question and rolls her eyes. “Yeah, that figures. Fen, can you see if Rafe has a decent pair he can borrow?” 

She ushers him to one of the rooms set aside for guests the logic of diplomacy doesn’t call for impressing with Whitespire’s generous hospitality. Quentin changes into a loose assemblage of navy blue cambric that he figures suits the current Fillorian interpretation of formal and inoffensive, feeling all the while a prickling anxiety. Margo’s urgency is bleeding into him, mixing unpleasantly with the torches lighting the stone walls, the patterned linen bedsheets on the four-poster bed, the ugly shock of the magic dulled now but lingering in his memory — god, he fucking hates being back here.

A knock comes at the door as he’s trying to figure out some curved leather loop that looks like it could go around the shoulder or the waist. “Come in?”

Eliot steps in, holding out a pair of simple black boots with a welcoming smile. “I come bearing footwear.”

Quentin takes them, feeling a shot of relief through the tension. Eliot has that effect on him, still, or maybe again. “Do you know how I’m supposed to wear this?”

Eliot takes the piece of leather and in a few deft movements fastens it around Quentin’s midsection. “There you go — very official.” He gestures towards a long mirror standing by the bed and Quentin looks himself over. He looks — he wishes he hadn’t cut his hair. His face is — whatever, he can’t do anything about that. From the neck down he looks Fillorian and unobjectionable, which he figures is the goal. “Should I put my hair back?”

“I think it’s fine,” says Eliot. “A lot of their officials wear it long and loose.” He cocks his head. “Are you okay? You seem nervous.”

That’s one word for it. “Yeah, I — I guess.”

“I’m sorry.” Eliot purses his lips in regret. “I know we’re putting a lot of pressure on you. Margo’s not — she wants this solved, obviously, and she’s stressed, but she’s not going to blame you if it doesn’t work.”

Quentin nods, still looking at his reflection. He feels like a little kid playing dress-up. Or like a teenager playing dress-up who hasn’t figured out yet he’s too old for this game. “It’s just weird,” he says. “Being here, after…” He’s planning to leave it unsaid because even naming the _everything_ of it all feels like letting too much of it in when he’s supposed to be focusing on impressing a queen, but his mind reminds him of the ways Eliot could fill that silence and hastily he adds, “Not — not because of us, or — you know, anything with that. Just — it’s just my shit.”

Eliot nods understandingly. “This place has put us through a lot.”

That’s not exactly the issue, for Quentin, but he can’t afford to go down that particular psychological rabbit hole now or maybe ever, so he shoves it to the side, turning back to Eliot. “Hi, by the way.” Impulsively he wraps him in a hug, Rafe’s shoes still dangling from his hands.

“Hi,” Eliot says, warm, squeezing him back. Quentin — can’t really relax against him, but — he’s glad Eliot is here, anyway.

“I should get these on and get going,” he says. He sits on the bed to slide his feet into the boots, trying to focus on looking presentable, on Eliot’s company, on helping Margo, and not on the morass of bitterness and humiliation that’s been brewing at the back of his mind ever since he realized he would have to come back here: all those hissing voices reminding him that in a life spent chasing the escape of bullshit stories, this was the bullshit story he loved first and longest. The one he most badly wanted to be true. The one that said: You can escape.

*

Lady Xanthis of the Fingerlings is tall — taller than Quentin by a lot, although at least some of that is the thick armored boots, overlapping plates of metal climbing to her knees — and imposing, broad-shouldered even beneath the ceremonial bronze armor, inlaid with curving gold designs. She has a strong and steely countenance and golden-tanned skin gleaming on her bare arms slightly, like it’s been coated in oil, and her hair is silver — not like she’s gone gray. Silver like the metal, or like a video game character, maybe — a long straight sheet with a peculiar moonlight lustre catching in the glow of the fire. Her eyes are very pale in her angular face.

“Magician,” she says when he approaches, in a deep resonant voice. She steps forward from the spear-wielding guards flanking her sides.

“Your highness.” Quentin bows his head slightly. Margo told him to aim for humble.

The queen takes a moment, presumably looking him over. “This is your expert magician?”

“The best in the biz,” Margo chirps. “And he doesn’t work for just anyone, so.”

“Let me see your face.” Quentin tilts his chin up to meet her eyes while she studies him, trying to project deference. “Magician, your king proposes that I entrust you with an object sacred to my people, gifted to my family by the great Questing raven Quoth himself in exchange for our assistance in driving the hunters from the Darkling Woods, protected by us even after the shame of Themistolae. How can I be certain that having restored it to its glorious purpose you will not abscond with it beyond the Fillorian veil?”

“Uh,” Quentin says, startled. Margo didn’t prep him for this. “I — well I won’t, definitely, I — I, like, _super_ promise, and — and who even knows if the knife would work off Flllory — I mean I don’t have a lot going on, a magic knife is not really — I don’t know, do you want to hold something of mine? Like — um — I could give you my laptop, I guess, that’s probably the most expensive thing I own —”

Xanthis laughs, booming and hearty. “Oh!” she says with a mirthful glance at Margo. “A simpleton. Wonderful. Clearly lacking the requisite sophistication to engage in treachery. My knife will be safe with you.”

“Yep,” Quentin says, trying to ignore the defensive flush along his neck. This is good, he tells himself. No matter how irritatingly hilarious Margo is probably finding it. “That’s me. What you see is pretty much what you get.”

The lady narrows her eyes at him. “And yet — why then should I believe your spells will be able to achieve what no blacksmith of our islands has managed in a century of trying, nor any other of your king’s magicians in all these many weeks?”

“Well —” Quentin starts trying to game out his response, then realizes he doesn’t really have a choice here. He’s not a good enough liar to bank on getting away with it. “To be totally real with you, it might not. It’s kind of a — new technology, and I haven’t tried it on something like this before. But I’ve fixed other things, so I know that it works — and it’s not just more of the same, from the things the others have tried, it’s like — kind of radical actually, in how it — anyway. So — I don’t know if it’ll work, and it’ll probably take me a couple tries, but — I think it might. Although —” He hesitates, then figures it’s better to get this over with upfront. “You should know it might not — look quite the same, when it’s done. It’ll — it’ll do what you need it to do, if I can get it, but — it might change. So. If that’s okay…”

Xanthis holds his gaze, deliberating. Then a small smile appears on her face. “Your straightforwardness is appreciated, magician.” She gives a nod to the attendants, two of whom break formation to bring over a jeweled box and set it heavily into Quentin’s arms. “You may make your attempts, and we shall continue to hold the peace. Keep us abreast of your progress.”

Quentin nods, startled by how easy that wound up being. “We will, uh — your majesty. Thank you, for — the opportunity.” Inwardly he cringes like, what is this, a job interview? But — well, kind of.

“Make good use of it,” says the queen with an unsettling note of warning in her voice. Facing regally forwards, she leads her delegation out of the throne room, Fen smilingly glad-handing them through their exit. Quentin’s afraid to move until the double doors are shut thick behind them.

“Did she say the knife was given to them by Quoth the raven?” he asks.

Margo laughs. “Yeah, that sounds like this dumbass planet.”

“Sure.” God, he hates this place.

Margo turns to him, eyebrows lifted high. “Hey, that was pretty well done. High quality pants-charming.” Then shifting into a familiar smirk she adds, “For a simpleton.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Well, we got it.”

She gestures at the box. “Are you taking that home?”

“I —” He wants to. Like, badly. He doesn’t want to stay here another fucking second if he doesn’t have to. It’s making his skin crawl, this — this _place_. But there are rules, he knows, that govern the make of magical objects, and he knows they don’t always play nicely with magic from other domains. He should at least suss it out. “I don’t know. Let me see.”

Quentin opens the box. The knife is resting in two pieces on purple velvet; he should break it into more than that, to be safe. He has a hunch that even if this is doable, it’s going to take some trial and error. “I’m going to need something to break a piece off — it should only need a small chip to work, and that’ll give me more breathing room.” He studies the mottled silver material of the blade. “I don’t know what it’s made of, or how malleable it is.”

“But it’s metal, right?” says Margo, coming to peer at it. “Should soften with heat? I can work a concentrated cryo channel pretty finely, if you need.”

“Yeah, that should work,” he says. “I should have thought of that — thanks. As for location —” Reluctantly he opens his awareness to let the brambled Fillorian magic in, trying to ignore its harsh edges so he can read the object almost the way he’s always known to read broken things, but a little better now — more precise, more thorough. He gets more information now, more data that he can use. But he doesn’t need that level of detail here; a quick scan is enough to know. “I don’t think I can work this one on Earth.” He shakes his head, trying to stave off the dread. “The magic — it’s too foreign, I don’t think it’ll interact right, not without a lot of rewrites and — this is kinda time-sensitive, right?”

“She didn’t exactly give us a due date,” says Margo, “but it’d be nice not to bank on her patience.” She nods, then gives him a grin. “Alright. Let’s cut this symbolic phallus, and then we can find Hoberman and get you set up.”

*

“Q let the dogs out!” Josh calls out as he walks out into the soft autumn air of the gardens. “I heard you did nice work with our friend to the southwest.”

“Josh, hey,” says Quentin. It’s a relief seeing him here. His impermeable normalcy is like a comforting Earthly talisman against the mindfuck of being surrounded by his childhood dream turned worst nightmare squared. “It went okay.” He lifts up the box, now containing a set of separated metal pieces, as proof. “So what are we working with here?”

Josh leads him over to an empty plot. “I placed an optimistic bet and cleared some space for you — from what I remember of the spell I think this should be enough, although we might want to revisit that based on the knife’s potency, right?” Quentin nods in assent. “In terms of materials, everything you’ve been using is something I’ve got stocked in the cabinets inside, and basically my next five levels of recommendations minimum if you want to switch things up — feel to browse. Oh — we’re out of pulverized hemp, but I think we’re due to restock soon, and I’d be surprised if that’s the direction you want to take things in anyway.”

“What about the lunar circumstances?” Quentin asks. “How does that work in a place with two moons?”

Josh rolls his eyes with a dramatic sigh. “Like a pain in my ass, is how. That was one of my first big projects when I shifted here full-time — trying to gather astronomical data to compile for a naturalist’s almanac. It paid off — not to brag, but I’m pretty sure it’s thanks to the agricultural outreach we did once we had our first print run that we haven’t experienced some major disruptions to the supply chain from the shortages — but that was a headache and a half.”

“The farmers could use that?” says Quentin, briefly distracted by curiosity. “They were casting?”

“They didn’t need to,” says Josh. “Fillory _is_ magic, remember? It’s a lot more… independent here. If you set out the dots, sometimes they basically connect themselves.”

“Right,” says Quentin. He did know that — sometimes, in the other life, tasks that had seemed like ordeals would reveal themselves to be shockingly easy, if they followed the rules. “So what’s the deal? Is it a two-week cycle?”

“I wish,” says Josh. “As far as I’ve been able to tell, there’s a handful of dual-moon circumstances that work comparably to the new and full set points on Earth — I’ve got a table with the info set up in the almanac. Technically since the moons operate on something like thirty-year cycles, we won’t know in advance that I’ve nailed them all till they happen, but in my experience it’s not hard to tell once you’re casting when I’ve accidentally highlighted a dud. Figuring that out was mostly trial and error and way more number-crunching than I prefer to operate with, so just trust me that it’s been thoroughly thought through and there’s a complicated yet perfectly logical reason for everything that would just be unbelievably boring for me to go into right now. The main thing to know is that the spacing and duration varies — sometimes barely at all, sometimes quite a bit — so that might fuck with your set-up.”

“Got it,” says Quentin. “When’s the next sowing point?”

“There’s one tomorrow,” says Josh, “but the cycle’s a little longer than what you’ve been using.”

“So I'll have to re-do the duration values," he says "Okay."

Josh leads him to the cabinet, where Quentin takes out the materials he needs, and offers to mix them in a pewter bowl which he says is sort of the essential oils of naturalism — “Some people swear by it, some people say it’s a scam, I figure it can’t hurt if you’re in a crunch” — while Quentin starts scratching through the meta-math to adjust the duration spell. Trying to push away thoughts of how much he hates this — the stupid quill and the dumb parchment and the sunlight streaming too brightly through the tall arched windows — he says, “So is this all you? The gardens?”

“Oh, god, no,” says Josh, “no, I have a staff — some locals who come in a couple days a week to work on dedicated projects, and Lis, who we found out by the Burnt River. She’s got her own room here now, basically my second-in-command — a genius at coordinating logistics, I’d be screwed without her. She’s a girl that really knows where her towel is.”

Quentin curls a smile at his calculations. “I always wondered what the Guide would say about Fillory.”

Josh chuckles. “You have to assume it would get more than ‘mostly harmless.’”

“Warning,” Quentin speculates. “The environs are not as charmingly whimsical as they appear. Visitors are likely to leave with physical and psychological scars. Avoid if you value literally any aspect of your well-being.”

“But in the pros column,” says Josh, “the automatic Babelfish set-up is pretty handy. And you can hook-up with a harpy, if you play your cards right.”

“Guess I can’t argue with that,” says Quentin. Fortunately it comes out only a little sour. “Alright. I think I’m set. If you’re done there I’m gonna head out and make plans to Travel back tomorrow.”

“You’re not staying?” Josh says. “We have a hell of a menu tonight — rosemary chicken as the centerpiece.”

“Thanks,” he says, “but I have some things I need to do.” It’s not a lie, he reasons. He needs to get the fuck out of here, and he needs a goddamn drink, and he needs a good night’s sleep. Maybe it’ll feel better, returning after that.

*

Spoiler alert: it does not feel better.

It doesn’t help that Quentin’s in a bad mood by the time Twenty-Three picks him up, wearing kind of a Fillorian spin on his usual layers-heavy style that involves a whole lot of draping fabric. He woke up — not, like, _hungover_ -hungover, but — he didn’t get a good night’s sleep, that’s for sure. And he hasn’t spent his day well, too focused on dreading his return to make much of his time away. He feels tense, irritable; he’s hoping to go in and out, cast quickly and bounce. He’s been talking with Josh about the maintenance; ideally most of it Josh can run while he’s out, till he comes back on harvest day to close out the spell.

But Jesus, this thing does not want to cooperate. It takes him three tries to get the spell properly started, and he can’t tell how much of that is that he’s unfocused and how much is that something about the architecture of it is inimical to Fillory’s weird feral magic. Once he’s finally got it flowing, he reaches to connect with the knife’s own dormant magic, and fuck — whatever it’s got going on make’s Fillory’s ambient seem like a lake on a windless day. It’s loud and needy and harsh and — it sounds stupid in his head, but it’s almost _mean_. He tries to ask it, the way he’s learned to ask, _what do you want?_ , and its reaction is immediate, visceral, and possibly best translated as _go fuck yourself_. “I’m trying to help you,” he snaps back, impatient, and loses the connection immediately. With a roll of his eyes he starts over yet again, trying to stay gentle, to stay open and patient and nonjudgmental. And it’s — better, he doesn’t scare it off this time, but — he sits there a _long_ time, trying to listen, trying to guide it, and even as he finally hits that last wingtip-cross when he’s sure he can’t get it any better suited for growing, he’s not optimistic about the prognosis.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he says, staring at the patch of soil.

“No?” says Josh. “Looked pretty good to me.”

Quentin shakes his head. “It’s — I don’t know what it is. It felt wrong. I’ve never — the compass was a lot, to manage the dual magic, but — this felt like it was fighting me, the whole time.”

Josh makes a thoughtful hum. “Well, we can run it, and if it doesn’t work we can revisit — maybe it needs a less active base. Amber or pearl, maybe swapped in for the agate. Or onyx, it has absorptive properties with certain spells. Some ground valerian might calm things down.”

“Maybe.” They’re good suggestions, Quentin knows; he doesn’t know why he’s having such a hard time believing this will work. Probably it’s just being here. For the first time in weeks he wants a fucking cigarette. He stands, dusts off his palms.

“So what are you thinking for tending?” says Josh. “I’m happy to add it to my rounds.”

Quentin really, really wants to take him up on that. But — he promised Margo. Not a half-assed attempt, but the real deal. “I think I should probably check in each day,” he says. “The magic in it — it’s going to be active as hell, and I’ll probably need to make — adjustments, as it goes. I don’t really know how to translate that stuff, into words — won’t even know what I’m looking for until it’s happening, so.” So. So he’ll be coming back to Fillory, and back, and back — another recursive loop in a life made up of them, a fresh reminder that he’ll never escape courtesy of the place that first made him believe he could.

*

What sucks is that it’s so stupid. Twenty-three blips him out, grumbling about adding to his lift, straight to the garden and back; he’s there as long as he needs to replenish or add to the mix as needed, touch base with that awful writhing magic which by the day refuses to be tamed, and maybe tut a few enhancements if he thinks it might help, and then he’s gone. It’s a few minutes out of his day; that shouldn’t be long enough to fuck with his life. And like, he’s being good, okay, mostly — all those things that make it worth getting out of bed in the morning, he’s not giving them up. He’s fucking clawed his way to a halfway decent life, and he has no intention of giving that up because of some idiot planet created by careless gods.

But he wants to, sometimes. That voice, the _I wish I were dead_ voice, he can’t fucking shake it or redirect its tracks, and there are moments it feels like it used to — like the truest possible piece of himself. Spending his days in the shadow of the story he so badly wanted to star in, the humiliation of his own desire clinging to him like mud — having to shoulder the reality that he’d played pretend right into the fucking grave — everything gets harder, under that. Everything takes a fight in his defective head. Every fucking second he has to argue against the voice he thought he’d finally outgrown, the voice that reminds him of just how fucking stupid he’s been (always been, always will be), once again blaring loud and clear on every goddamn station, forcing him to live with how long he’d clung to every embarrassing juvenile dream, and there are moments, fleeting but real, when he thinks — he could just not. He could just — stop. There are times when he remembers that and for just a second, before reality sets back in, the thought feels like relief.

He hates knowing that about himself, almost more than he hates feeling it.

*

“Are you okay?” asks Serena. They’re walking from a bus stop back to her place, a solid distance but it’s a nice September night out, pleasantly cool. “You seem quiet.”

Quentin feels his jaw clench, works to undo it. If he winds up torpedoing the first normal semi-relationship of his life because he can’t get over his hangups about a fucking children’s book — but he doesn’t have to, he tells himself; he doesn’t have to let his past self destroy his present. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “I just —” He searches for a way to explain that won’t require, like, _explaining_ -explaining; _Fillory is real_ on its own seems like a lot to get into while they’re taking things slow. _Fillory is real and made me even more of a crazy person than I already fucking was_ — hard to imagine that’s not a dealbreaker. “I’m helping a friend out, with something, and it’s kind of stressing me out. A — mending favor, sort of. It’s kind of — high-stakes, for her, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to pull it off.” He wonders after he says it if he’s hiding something; he wonders if maybe he’s allowed to hide this, for now at least. It’s been barely over a month. He doesn’t know what the official timetable on mature adult relationships says about when to spill about your fuck-ups, but he feels like that’s got to be within the grace period.

Serena hums sympathetically, squeezes his hand. That feels nice. “As long as you’re trying, like, she can’t be mad, right?”

“Right,” he says, trying to focus on her palm against his. Skin on skin, undeniable. “That’s true.”

“Anything I can do to help?”

The slight swing of their arms as they walk. Their unhurried steps through the soft air. “This is helping,” he tells her. It is; can’t he want this to be only new? Isn’t he allowed one place untouched by every fucking mess he’s made? One place he can be just the best parts of himself, cleaned up and polished for display. He plants a quick kiss on her cheek, and she smiles.

Back at her apartment they stand in her bedroom for a long time just kissing, their arms wrapped around each other in that liminal space between warmth and heat, and Quentin tastes her mouth and licks against her bottom lip and holds her close and tells himself: This is your real life. This is it, and it’s not going anywhere if you don’t leave or fuck it up. He feels his body start to unwind against her touch, desire spreading through his limbs, and he remembers that he wants this; he wants this, and he has this, and there’s nothing in this room to run away from.

*

Adding a spritz of some Fillorian distillation Josh says works as a substitute for lavender oil pisses the knife right off, and Quentin spends a half hour frantically wrestling the magic back into some semblance of order and functionality, grateful again for his recent experiments with alternative castings; his Brakebills training would not have fucking covered this. It covered barely anything, it seems to him now; he was so sure it was the answer, and it didn’t even give him what he needed at the one thing it purported to teach well. God, he’d been so fucking — stupid, and desperate, and —

The spell flares up again and he pushes his thoughts to the side, trying to tame it.

He manages to get it to work — as well as it had been, he’s pretty sure; but there’s a fizzy edge to it that keeps — sparking, almost. He’s pretty sure it’s harmless, but — if he’s doing his due fucking diligence as the magician in charge of this, he should probably sit with it a while, to make sure it’s not going to blow up a wing of the castle when he’s not looking.

Fucking wonderful.

Quentin heads into the castle for two quick errands. First, he finds Twenty-Three, embroiled in a spirited game of checkers with of all people Fen — so they’ve apparently bonded, why not — and lets him know it’ll be probably be a couple hours before he needs a ride back. Second, he heads to the kitchen to grab a bottle of wine.

And a glass. He’s making a calculated choice here about what qualifies as harm reduction re: his mental state, or at least he hopes he is, but he’s got, like, manners.

He’s sitting on the ground with his arms around his knees, working through his second pour and trying to focus on what emendations to the spell might make the probably inevitable round two more successful — an expanded netting sequence? wider pool diameter? amphibious bone shavings? — instead of how much being here makes him want to grind his own bones into sand, when he hears footsteps approaching on the grass. He turns in their direction. “Eliot?”

Eliot smiles and waves at him. He’s holding a glass of wine and trailing two wooden chairs in the air behind him, which he sets down when he reaches the edge of the soil plot. “I ran into Fen and she told me you were out here — I know you’re kind of busy, but I thought you could use some company.”

“You don’t have anything better to do?” says Quentin. “No youth groups to lead or guidance to counsel? No one to remind that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take?”

Eliot’s smile falters in this way like he’s not sure whether to be hurt or not, and Quentin — feels awful, immediately, god what is _wrong_ with him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, standing up. “I’m really — can I have like a do-over, or a take-back, or — I’m being a dick, and you’re — I’m really sorry.”

Eliot relaxes, which somehow makes Quentin feel like even more of a heel. “Consider it taken back.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says.

The chairs are sturdy and slightly reclined and comfier than they look, like handmade lawn furniture. Quentin’s got his awareness tuned to the spell under the dirt just enough that he’ll notice if something unexpectedly fucked up happens. They sit for a few minutes, in the autumn breeze a little colder than San Diego but not yet by much, listening to the fucking — songbirds trilling in some trees nearby, drinking their wine. One advantage of the heinousness of the setting, Quentin notes with grim amusement, is that if there were any awkwardness with Eliot left to be mined from recreating this particular tableau, his teeth-grinding misery has obliterated it.

 _I wish I were dead_ , says the voice, and he tells it, _shut up, you stupid asshole, no you fucking don’t._

“I really am sorry,” he feels compelled to say again. “And I do — I do appreciate the company. It’s — I don’t love it, being back here. In Fillory.”

Eliot nods, watchful. “It took me a while to get used to it — coming back, after — you know. All the horror and near-death experiencing, et cetera.”

Quentin hesitates. He wasn’t exactly itching to talk about this today or fucking ever, but — it’s the Eliot thing again, the way being around him pulls words out of Quentin’s mouth. “It’s not just that, for me. It’s like — that, plus — what fucking Fillory, like, meant to me, when I was a kid — god, not even. Like — what it meant, right up until the point we got here and figured out just how bad it sucked ass.”

“It’s hard,” says Eliot. “When things aren’t — how you believed they were, when you thought they — mattered.” He gives a wry smile. “That’s kind of why I spent so long pretending like nothing mattered to me. It felt — easier, you know?”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. He kind of — doesn’t know; he’s never been able to pretend like that, always been jealous of people who could. But he knows, for Eliot, what that means. “And with Fillory it’s like — it’s not just the, the disappointment, or whatever. It’s not about the expectations versus reality aspect, it’s about — like, what does it say about _me_ , you know? That I — that I was so obsessed with this bullshit, for so long. That I wanted to —” His throat tightens. He drinks some wine. “I just feel stupid, I guess. For wanting to believe that — that there might be this world out there, this version of my life where I could just — leave all the shit behind, and be —” Important, courageous, happy, adored. “So that’s why — it’s like this giant reminder of that person I was.” Deluded, myopic, pathetic, afraid… “And I don’t — love revisiting that.”

Eliot gives him a soft smile. “I liked that guy.” That doesn’t really make Quentin feel better, but — it’s nice of him to say.

His glass is empty. He wants to refill it, but he sort of doesn’t want Eliot to see him do it. Which — as far as Eliot knows this is his first, so it doesn’t really matter, but — it feels weird, anyway; and it feels weird not to pour just because, what, Eliot’s watching? That’s — it shouldn’t matter. It’s not like Eliot can — _see_ , what he’s thinking or why or that he woke up hungover today and yesterday too, which isn’t even three days, and doesn’t matter, like — god. Quentin tries to remember if he’d ever — ever fucking _thought_ about it this month, before; these exhausting minute deliberations. He looks at Eliot, sitting at ease in his chair, eyes unfocused on some horizon. Eliot lifts his glass to his mouth, takes just a small sip; brings his hand back down, unbothered.

Quentin blurts out, “Do you think you’re an alcoholic?”

Eliot freezes with another look like he’s halfway to hurt but trying to give Quentin the benefit of the doubt before he shows it. Jesus, he’s a fucking mess today.

“I’m sorry,” he says, wondering if Eliot’s regretting his decision to be friends with Quentin now that he’s getting a chance to remember what it entails. “I shouldn’t have — I don’t —” He fumbles with words, trying to find the ones that will make it okay, but — no escape here either, probably; probably he just needs to — say it, for real. “I wasn’t really thinking about — about you. I mean I was, but not like —” He takes a deep breath, eyes on the ground. “So I was — I was kind of drinking a lot, before I left New York — I guess that’s not, like, a secret. And, um — then I got to Califorrnia and I was, you know, trying to get my shit together, so I figured I should probably do — less, of that. And — I did, I mean, I am. I’m not — you know, it’s not like it was. But it was, uh —” He swallows; tries to steady his trembling hands. His whole body is prickling unpleasantly hot, with nerves or shame. “It was kind of — harder, than I thought it would be. Like I thought I’d be able to just — decide to stop, or cut back, but — I don’t know. It kind of took some — trial and error. And now things are — better, like a lot better, but I still — I still wind up thinking about it. Not like — I’m not sitting there thinking about doing it, or whatever, just — I feel like there’s this running tally in my head now, sometimes, of how how much I’m drinking, and it’s mostly not — much, but — but there’s a part of me that’s like, if you have to think about it, like, isn’t that…” He can’t make himself fill in what that is. Might be. “So — I don’t know, I — you said something, a while back, about — drinking responsibly, and I was just — I wondered, I guess, if you — if you’d thought about it, or — I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” says Eliot. Quentin chances a look at him. Eliot’s face is — careful, tense, but — not upset, he thinks. “I…” Eliot looks down at his glass, swirls it; sets it on the grass with a wry smile. “My father was an alcoholic — well. Probably still is. I’ve told you that.”

“Yeah.” It doesn’t seem like a place to apologize again, but Quentin sure feels a thousand percent shittier after the reminder.

“So by the time I was sixteen I kind of just assumed I was, and there was no point really to trying not to be,” Eliot goes on. “I used to make a big joke about it — it seemed like one of the more palatable jokes to make about me, given — everything else. Then I left home, and —” He shakes himself a little, like he’s thinking of something he can’t quite believe. “Did I ever tell you why I moved to New York?”

Quentin thinks — surely Eliot must have. It must have come up, at least once in fifty years. But Quentin thinks he would remember, too, if it had. “I don’t think so.”

“Jesus.” Eliot shakes his head. “We had a fight, him and me, and it clicked for me suddenly that I was finally big enough to hit him back. And I did.”

Quentin nods. “And he kicked you out?”

Eliot makes a funny sad smile. “No. I —” His throat works for a second. “I realized that — that wasn’t actually what I wanted. You know. I hadn’t — stayed alive all that time, in that house, for it to make me — another version of him. And this was obviously after, you know, Logan — I didn’t, I didn’t want that to be my life. So I left.”

“God, El.” Quentin feels like he should say more, but he’s kind of dumbstruck with awe, thinking about — Eliot a million years ago, a fucking kid with less than nothing, looking at his shithole life and deciding to be — good.

Eliot doesn’t acknowledge this. “So I thought, okay. I’m _not_ like him. I’m not — Roy’s kid. I’m like, free and liberated and living in the big fucking city and sucking all the dicks I want and engaging in this like project of self-creation and also bee-tee-dubs drinking my weight in cheap tequila and doing like a million drugs, you know, for unrelated reasons, and then it was like — well, I can’t be an alcoholic, because my shitbag father is an alcoholic, and I have nothing in common with him, right? I — I proved that. So.” He looks down at his hands, brows knitting unhappily. “I was kind of — defensive about it, actually. Margo and I — I said some pretty heinous shit to her a couple times, when she tried to — talk to me about it. Because I couldn’t…”

He clears his throat. “And then, well, you were there for the next part, mostly, right? Brakebills, Beast-attacks, accidental royalty — that one was kind of a relief, actually; the options were so limited I had to drastically cut back, and I didn’t, like, lose my shit or anything. So that was nice, to — know about myself. And then you were — gone, and I was — out of my fucking mind on painkillers the first couple weeks, and a complete fucking mess once I was conscious enough to really feel what had happened, and, um. Some choices were made. Some not great choices. Margo found me in a bathtub with my clothes on and told me, you know, that I couldn’t — she said basically she couldn’t survive, losing me again, right after you had — so, uh. So I listened this time, finally — that’s when I started seeing my therapist.”

Quentin asks, trying to understand as completely as possible what Eliot’s telling him, “Did you talk about it in therapy?”

“I actually didn’t,” Eliot says. “I think in a weird way it helped, to have someone, like — like in my head I was like, _well, no you can’t just get wasted on a Tuesday afternoon, because then you’ll be in trouble with your therapist_. Which is stupid, but — kind of what I needed, maybe, then. And then as it started like — clicking, and I started feeling like maybe it was actually possible for me to — change, like, the stuff I was talking about there, it kind of transferred, so I could set some — some rules, I guess. Or — guidelines, at least. Like we talk a lot about — the ways I tend to, to run away when things get hard, so now I think — okay, well, it matters _why_ I’m doing it. If I want a mimosa because Margo and I are doing day-off brunch, or some wine on movie night, you know, that’s fine. Or if it’s a party, and no one gives a shit and we’re all having fun — also fine. But if I start feeling like, _oh shit, I need a drink_ , that’s maybe — not fine, and I should — find something else to do, instead.” He takes a slow breath in and out. “I do wonder — like you said. Obviously most people — they don’t have rules, and that works for them. So — so if I do need rules, to be fine, then — I don’t know, maybe I should just quit. But I haven’t.” He gives Quentin a sheepish half-smile. “I probably should talk to my therapist about that, right? Like — at some point.”

“Maybe.” Quentin shrugs. “I don’t know, you seem to be a lot better at therapy than I ever was, so.”

Eliot looks at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Quentin almost can’t believe Eliot needs this explained to him — the fact that Eliot is saying this, any of this, at _all_ much less functionally sober, the open-hearted bravery of it, not a fucking joke or deflection in sight, just because Quentin’s having a shitty day — it would be miraculous if it weren’t so human it almost hurt to witness. “I mean clearly it’s working. That’s all.”

Eliot’s eyes go bright. “Thanks,” he says softly. “That means a lot.”

“And you’re nothing like your dad,” Quentin says. “I’ve told you that.” He’s told him many times. But Eliot could always stand to hear it again. Quentin has a hunch that much hasn’t changed.

Eliot blinks rapidly, smiles. “Yeah. I know.”

“Good,” Quentin says definitively. The spell has settled, Quentin can tell; it’s not going to go haywire on the windows of Whitespire in the middle of the night. He’s still eager to get out of this place, but it feels wrong to walk out on Eliot, so soon after a moment like this. Quentin places his empty glass on the ground and leans back in the chair to sit in the stillness, a little while longer.

*

Back at home he picks up the book Kady gave him from its place on his nightstand, flipping through it. He doesn’t think Eliot needs it more than he does, exactly; Eliot seems to be doing just fine with this, kind of amazingly so. But he thinks Eliot would get something out of it, anyway. That sense of someone touching something real in you, not the same but close enough to matter. Of being a little less alone, with whatever it is. And Quentin wants to give it to him — to show that he was hearing the words beneath the words. That he always wants to know, whatever it is in Eliot’s heart.

After doing a quick tune-up in the garden — nothing major to adjust today, thank god — he finds Eliot in one of the central chambers going over some kind of diagram. Seating chart, is Quentin’s best guess. “Hey,” he says, holding out the book. “Have you read this?”

Eliot blanches a little at the title, but he accepts the offering. “No. Should I?”

Quentin scratches the back of his neck. “I really liked it,” he says. “It kind of — helped me, with — you know. What we were talking about yesterday. I think — I mean, I think you don’t really need the help, based on — how you’re doing, honestly, but — you might appreciate it. If, I don’t know, you get called away on a days-long carriage ride and are desperate for entertainment.”

Eliot’s mouth curls up a little. “I actually read things now sometimes. On purpose, even.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow, half-skeptical and half-impressed. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, it’s actually one of my — things I do when I don’t want to do things that are worse,” says Eliot. “Not like — I’m not going to read the fucking _Game of Thrones_ books —”

“ _A Song of Ice and Fire_ ,” Quentin says automatically.

“— Margo already tried, so don’t even start. But like, did you know Mindy Kaling wrote a book? And Shonda Rhimes?” Eliot rolls his eyes. “No one tells me these things. Like, all these years I thought I hated books, and it turns out actually the problem is somehow all of my friends are fucking nerds.”

Quentin smiles in spite of himself, astonished that even now Eliot is surprising him, that even here he can sprinkle some delight. “Yeah, well,” he says, “Martin’s never gonna finish _The Winds of Winter_ anyway, so you’re not missing much.”

*

The spell is a failure; Quentin can tell as soon as he initiates the harvesting sequence. The magic is all the fuck over the place, less the familiar crackle of potential than sheer static bouncing aimless and agitated. He goes through the motions out of a sense of resigned obligation, but he’s not surprised when he sifts through the dirt and pulls out a chip of metal barely larger than he started with.

“Bummer, dude,” says Josh sympathetically.

Quentin nods down at the barren patch of soil. “It sure the fuck is.” He’ll have to come back; the knowledge seeps into him like cold, boring right through to the bone. More weeks of fucking marinating in every worst and most humiliating impulse, of grinding his teeth trying to keep it from bleeding into his actual life — he shakes himself. At least he’ll get a break. “When’s the next cycle start?”

“Not for another couple weeks,” says Josh. "I have to look up the exact date, but it's sometime in late November."

“Alright.” Quentin stands up, holding the piece of metal. “I’m gonna go home, clear my head, do some brainstorming about what we might want to try switching around. I’ll call you in a week? Maybe? We can trade ideas?”

“Sounds like a plan,” says Josh. He gives Quentin finger-guns. Quentin doesn’t have it in him to mind.

*

It’s a relief to shake himself loose of the drag of Fillory for a while. It is. Quentin feels lighter, a little, more able to move forward again instead of just treading water to stay afloat. He starts making his way in earnest through the set of readings his editor recommended looking at to incorporate into his revisions, spending hours at his desk or on the porch reading and highlighting and taking notes and making edits; he emails or calls people who’ve gotten in touch or who Kady’s recommended as potentially interested in joining some kind of hypothetical network to connect people using magic to others who can help, figuring with such a fuzzy nascent idea it might help to set up times to have real conversations with people about how they use magic, what they can do and what they need. Luisa sets a spellshare date and when he’s out in the city Quentin starts carrying a stack of fliers and the mended compass, peeking at it in coffeeshops or at bus stops to spot candidates he can slip a flier to with a surreptitious half-completed tut to signal he’s the same.

He jogs, he goes to book club, he brings Serena home and stays up talking and laughing about nothing much after sex and in the morning he cooks her eggs. It should be so good but it doesn’t touch him; it doesn’t seem real. He feels too light, like his feet aren’t planted on the earth; like at any moment a current could come and whisk him out of his own life, and he’d be powerless to stop it. Going through the motions, waiting for everything around him to come crumbling down. The moment you realize you’ve been dreaming, in the last few seconds before the knowledge wakes you up, your dream-body suddenly made of air — it feels like that, every minute of every day. As if his life before, the life where Quentin was a person who knew at least a little about how to live, had been itself a long and lovely dream, and Fillory had reminded him: that’s not you. Who the fuck did you think you were trying to fool?

*

“Tamora Pierce,” says Serena, a fond smile spreading across her face. They’re at a bistro near her apartment, the morning after Quentin spent the night. Wrought iron tables, paintings by local artists on the wall. A lot of stuff by some guy that does sub-Banksy type pop culture subversions. Mickey Mouse shaking hands with George Bush, that type of shit. “That was a big one for me, for years. I had these spiral notebooks filled up with terrible knock-offs.”

“My friend Julia was into her,” says Quentin. His head hurts; he slept badly. “I read a few, because she insisted — never really clicked for me.”

“Too girly?” Serena teases.

He smiles at her. “Probably. I was an idiot in high school.”

She shifts her toe against his ankle under the table, briefly. “So what was your thing?”

Quentin could lie. He could say Pern or _Lord of the Rings_ or Narnia or Redwall or Garth Nix or even Harry fucking Potter and the thing is he spent enough of his life burying himself in someone else’s pages that he could if prompted sound convincingly once-obsessed with any of those. He could lie and stay a little longer here in this bubble where he only has to be the self she already knows, without admitting that every other asshole he’s been lurks always just beneath the surface, waiting to contaminate anything that might for a second be new.

She’d asked him to be honest, though. Back when he’d thought maybe he could have what he wanted without pretending to be something he wasn’t. When he’d thought the not pretending was the thing he wanted most. He doesn’t really feel like he has a choice when he says, “Did you ever read Fillory and Further?”

“Oh yeah,” she says, “I think once, in middle school. And one time I went down the weird missing-Chatwin-kids rabbit hole in college when I was procrastinating.”

Quentin takes a sip of his oat milk latte. It’s gone lukewarm. “That was my thing. For like, years.” Years of his life spent chasing impossible escapes. Spent hiding his face away, and from what?

Serena tilts her head, thoughtful. It’s funny that he still likes this about her — the way he can watch her filing things away and putting pieces together, fleshing out her picture of him — even as it seems more and more likely that it’s accelerating the approach of the moment when she sees him clearly enough to decide to walk away. “Why those?”

He thinks bitterly of all the bullshit ways he’s answered that question: the draw of the real-life mystery, the inventive whimsy of the imagined world, the humble nobility of the siblings at the story’s core. “Honestly,” he says, “I think I always liked the whole secret door thing. The idea that if I found the right trick I could just — step out of my actual life, and into this, like, alternate dimension where I — mattered, instead of the one where I was eating lunch in the third-floor bathroom on the days my one friend was sick.” He rolls his eyes, flushing hot with the sense that he’s said too much. “Like I said, I was kind of an idiot in high school.”

Serena says kindly, “Adolescence is basically a slow-motion horror movie. Everyone was kind of an idiot in high school.”

Not like me, Quentin thinks, almost like a violent spasm. The rest of the world managed to outgrow that shit along the way; he’d clung to it like a fucking teddy bear, telling himself the story where he mattered right into death itself. And he wants, he so badly wants to think that there’s a silver lining there, that at least maybe that piece of him had died for good, but it feels so close, now. Hovering malevolent and ghostly at the edge of the breakfast table, reminding him it’s only ever a matter of time.

*

Penny picks him up to go talk with one of Kady’s contacts in Florida of all places about forging connections. Quentin takes notes while a bleached-blonde Cuban woman wearing a nose ring and a tall gangly white guy with short dark hair tell them about the areas the local hedge community could most use assistance in developing their magic, their strengths and inclinations and the resources they already have and might be able to share. He’s trying to think about how to sort their findings to be useful later but his brain is moving like molasses; it’s all he can do to jot down a rough transcript, getting as much information as he can. He’ll figure some kind of order out later, maybe. He’s got to wrap up the edits on his article.

When they shake hands and walk out of the ramshackle bungalow and down the driveway, Penny stops for a second, looking around discomfited.

“What’s up?” Quentin asks.

Penny shakes his head. “It’s just weird, being here. When I left this shithole I swore up and fucking down I was never going to cross that particular state line again.”

“Oh,” says Quentin. “You grew up around here?”

“Not that close,” says Penny, “but — it’s familiar enough. The fucking — swampland vibes.” He gives a little shudder. “Probably just the humidity. But it feels, like — haunted, you know? Double-vision, or whatever. Like we accidentally time-traveled, and I’m about to see myself at eighteen, blowing off Mandel’s history class to robo-trip behind the bleachers.”

“That’s how I feel everywhere,” Quentin says without thinking.

“Like getting high on cough syrup?” Penny asks, raising an eyebrow.

“No,” Quentin says, _although_ — “Like I’m about to be ambushed by a past life.” What is he saying, why is he talking — Penny doesn’t want to hear this. It doesn’t even make sense.

Penny studies him. “You doing okay?”

Quentin shakes himself. He’s being fucking — stupid, melodramatic, same it ever fucking was. “Yeah, sorry. Just — tired. Trouble sleeping.”

Penny nods, looking less than convinced. “Have you tried, like, melatonin or any of that crap?”

“It makes me groggy,” he says.

Penny is still looking at him. Quentin rakes his hair back, wishing he hadn’t said anything. “You wanna grab a bite or something?”

“Thanks,” says Quentin, “but I can’t. I gotta get some stuff done.” Not a lie, he tells himself; he has to engage in the very important task of not getting himself added to Penny’s suicide watch list. Penny would tell Julia who would — whatever. It’s fine. You’re overreacting, Coldwater.

Penny seems like he wants to say more, but he doesn’t; just reaches for Quentin’s shoulder and zaps them back to California. Before he waves off to head home Quentin hears himself say, “Wait.”

Penny looks at him expectantly.

“If you did see him,” says Quentin, “what would you tell him? Your eighteen-year-old self.” 

Penny considers this for a long moment. “It actually can kind of get better,” he says finally, “but — only if you do.” 

Quentin forces a smile. Yeah, that sounds right. He feels like he’s swallowing battery acid, or like he wants to. “Good advice.”

“It’s not really advice,” says Penny, with a weird look on his face. “It’s just kinda — true.”

Quentin nods. For some people, it sure fucking is.

*

He’s been sleeping like shit because he’s been getting these dreams — even more fucked up than the usual offerings of his unconscious. Dreams about the mirror realm, where he sees shards of himself distorted and hostile around every corner. Dreams where he’s picked up the abyss key and now he’s staring at a knife and waiting for its apparition to work its ruthless spell and wondering if he shouldn’t just take the knife and beat it to the punch. Dreams where he’s digging a grave and the beaten-up corpse to the side is him and suddenly he’s looking out from his own dead eyes watching himself shovel dirt out of a hole deeper, and deeper, and deeper. He wakes up breathless, half-paralyzed, his entire body so tense sparks of pain are shooting down his nerve endings, too alert to fall back asleep, too bleary with fatigue to get up. Gulping air like he’d been drowning, wrung-out, exhausted. Feeling like he’s waiting still, waiting always — waiting for everything beyond this lonely darkness to go up inevitably in smoke.

*

“So I thought that would be the hard part,” says Eliot, “but obviously now that we’ve more or less committed to implementing some kind of national currency, there’s like a million decisions to be made about, like, paper or metal, or some kind of mix, and who’s going to print it, or make it, and are we using some kind of external monetary standard or whatever system Julia said the US uses now, and so on.”

“Mm,” says Quentin. He picks at his cuticle.

“Fen is spearheading the Committee On Iconographic Nominations to start surveying the country, see what kinds of images Fillory wants representing itself. It’s the first project she’s really taken ownership of and she’s thrilled, it’s honestly very cute.”

“That’s good,” says Quentin. His head hurts. He didn’t think he drank enough last night to get a hangover. Maybe it’s not. Maybe he’s just dehydrated. Or stressed, or —

Eliot is silent on the other line, the kind of silence that means he’s turning words over in his head to say them right. “The book was good. Um. The one you gave me, about — it’s funny, I feel like if I’d tried to read it a couple years ago I would have been like, what the fuck do I care about some Cambridge WASP who went to Brown, but — but you were right. I did appreciate it.”

“I’m glad.” Quentin has been trying to think about Eliot’s rules, what Eliot said about wanting and needing and what’s okay and what maybe isn’t. Some nights it helps and he shakes himself and goes for a jog in the dark, not worrying about form or miles or anything except tiring himself out. Some nights it doesn’t help.

Eliot continues, “It — reading it felt — I don’t know. It just, it helped me think more about — the ways I run, and the things I use to do that, and — thank you. For giving it to me.”

Quentin thinks about all the shit Eliot has had to run away from, the life he inherited and refused to accept as his destiny. Who wouldn’t be terrified of that? What the fuck is Quentin’s excuse? What exactly is he so afraid of? “Yeah, no problem.”

“Anyway.” Eliot clears his throat like he’s brushing his own softness to the side. “So how’s life?”

Last night Quentin had a dream where San Diego was a wasteland, like a fully catastrophic nuclear apocalypse desert out of a zombie flick, and everyone was blaming the Beast and it turned out the Beast was him. He woke up with his heart pounding and guilt coursing through his veins and the thought that lingered as his body calmed down — _I want to die, I wish I were dead_ — and he drew his knees up into a little ball and cried because he wanted to die and cried because he didn’t actually want to die but that hadn’t stopped him before and cried because he felt so embarrassed and so ashamed to still be waking up in the night like this after all this time. It seems so fucking stupid in the light of day. “It’s okay. Pretty uneventful.”

“Nice,” says Eliot. “How are things going with — it was Serena, right?”

“Yeah.” Quentin makes an involuntary fist, unmakes it. Thinks about saying: Things are going just peachy, except for the part where she’s dating a person who doesn’t exist. Who’s never existed, never will. And when she figures who she really signed up for, well — I for one won’t fucking blame her for what comes next. “Things are good, I think. We’re, you know. Taking it slow, still. But — it’s nice. She’s great, so.”

“That’s good,” Eliot says softly. “I’m really glad.”

“Thanks,” says Quentin. His stomach hurts. He hasn’t eaten since waking up but he feels like if he eats he’s going to hurl. He feels so fucking alone.

*

The spellshare at the end of October focuses on a variety of formats for temperature work, from creative cryo applications to blasts of ice and fire. It’s Rishi’s first time, and he keeps geeking out about the variety of spell-types on display, the casting styles he’s never used and the potential for mathematically calculating changes in skill and effort required when collaboration is introduced. Quentin kept thinking he ought to invite his New York friends but he didn’t. He did invite Serena, and then felt like an idiot for inviting her because it felt like playing further at this game he knows he’s doomed to lose, but she seems to have a good time, chatting with another naturalist about greenhouse techniques and with Luisa about the general coolness of the event; at one point she slides a hand comfortably around his waist to say hi. It’s a good day, by all measures, he _knows_ that, but he can’t make it feel good. Even the liveliness of blowing a gentle heatwave around the room doesn’t distract him from the persistent sense of unreality that’s set in, that conviction that he’s about to take the gifts that have somehow amassed themselves before him and light a fucking pyre for the person he’s pretending to be.

He’s doing fine, he’s a fucking mess. He runs miles and miles until his brain is blanked out from exertion, he spends whole days staring at the walls in his room. He goes to yoga because it’s fucking good for you or whatever, he skips book club becaus he can’t get out of bed. He puts off working on his article, then stays up for forty straight hours finishing edits and sends it in. He makes it a week teeth-grittingly sober, he spends two days drinking himself stupid, stopping mostly because he’s got plan to go to a concert with Serena, some band she likes he’s never heard of. It’s loud and fast and fun, the diminutive lead singer clearly enjoying the chance to play a magician-run venue and let loose with wild acoustic spells, and Quentin spends the entire show feeling like he’s an anthropologist from another dimension, watching from just outside his body at all these people with their real human lives. He drinks one too many beers and can’t get it up and Serena is super fucking nice about it, tipsy and giggling herself while he kisses along her body, crying out satisfied when he eats her out, but it still makes him want to fucking die. They fuck in the morning and it’s slow and gentle and good, and things are fine. He’s fine. The voice in his head says _I wish I were dead_ and he thinks wearily _can you give it a fucking rest, for once, please._

He dreams about killing his father, he dreams about killing Julia, he dreams about the Seam. At night he gets into bed and his pulse starts speeding up in anticipation of whatever horrorshow his brain is getting ready to present him with and his thoughts drift inescapably to his litany of failings and evasions, his cruelty and his delusion, his narcissism and his cowardice, the same ugly catalogue he’s never needed someone else’s monster to whisper in his ear. He thinks about everyone he’s hurt and somehow had the fucking nerve to ask for more, about how he’d pushed Alice away and cut Margo out for less than nothing; he thinks about his father, the gap between them Quentin didn’t even try to close and never fucking will, lingering like a wound he can’t stanch. He thinks with waves of revulsion about last spring, careening across the country monstrous and broken like some half-alive creature of hateful appetites, and he feels physically sick to remember it, nauseous and feverish with shame and the memory of that festering anger knotted in his guts, that violence he’d carried and bitterly nursed towards Julia, for nothing, towards Eliot, for what — dumping him? Nothing too, worse than nothing, vortex of bitterness and bile swirling all the way down. He doesn’t understand it now any better than he did then, any of it — what he did or what he wanted and most of all why. The same fucking question he’s never been able to answer, that same blank space beneath every fucking crater where he’s laid waste to his own life, taunting him with the unfixable permanence of its mystery — why the fuck does he do this, always, and how the fuck is he ever supposed to believe he might stop if he can’t even understand what it is he’s been running from all this time?

*

Serena’s apartment, a Friday night. They’re making out on her bed, eager and unhurried, shirts already discarded but each still wearing jeans, and Quentin’s privately thankful that this part at least is still simple enough, for however much longer: making long trails with his palm on the smooth skin of her back, her lips hot and wanting on his, the soft startled sounds he can pull from her throat when he mouths at the curve of her neck and the hollows beneath. The heat spreading through his body, turning the volume down on his brain, keeping the other shit a little bit at bay.

He reaches down for the button at her waistband and obligingly she helps him out, swings her legs over to finish undressing while he does the same. They resume their previous positions, her weight pressing down on top of him, his face lifting up to kiss her, invigorated by the increased range of contact, their legs tangling together, a pleasing rhythm giving attention to his newly freed hard-on. Quentin slides a hand down to her hips, noticing distractedly that she’s still wearing her underwear — he’s only ever seen her in the same plain black style, simple and unadorned, a habit he finds both endearing and weirdly sexy — and moves to slip beneath the stretchy fabric, but she lifts her hips unexpectedly, pulls her face back just a bit. “Sorry,” he whispers, abashed, suddenly wondering if he’s managed to fuck things up here, too, if he’s misread or misunderstood or —

“No, it’s just —” Serena gives kind of a self-deprecating eye roll. “I got my period a day early, so.” 

“Oh,” he says, startled out of his downward swing. She’s looking him right in the eye, not quite like this is a test but with the definite implication that there’s an allowable set of actions here, and they weren’t determined by committee. It’s — kind of hot. “I don’t care.”

She smiles a little, like he’s offered an acceptable response. “I appreciate the open-mindedness, but — not to get TMI on you, but it’d be more than a little reminiscent of the elevator scene in _The Shining_. I’m not gonna dock you feminist points for not being into that.”

Quentin’s breath hitches as his brain fills in that image: all that red from her body spreading out, spilling onto him. “I’m not — _not_ into it. The opposite, actually — or, I sort of lost track of the negatives, but — I’m honestly pretty into it.”

Serena raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, I mean —” Laughing a little he finds her hand with his and guides her gently by her wrist to his cock, straining between them. “Do I seem turned off to you?”

“Huh.” She gives him a gentle squeeze, more affectionate than erotic, and studies his face, looking pleased. Quentin’s mouth has fallen slightly open. “I have to say, I didn’t see that one coming. Guess I underestimated you.”

A shiver runs through him, the unspoken wish: _let me fucking prove it_. “I mean if you don’t want to — like if you have, uh, cramps or whatever” — that’s a thing? That happens? He thinks? — “or you just don’t like it when you’re — you know — no pressure, obviously —”

She laughs at that, a real and hearty laugh. “No, I’m good. Very sweet of you to care, though.” She hops off her bed, slips into her robe. “I’ll be right back.”

Quentin waits for her to return feeling half-wild with anticipation, stroking himself slowly, just enough to take the edge off. Head filling with — the physicality of it, the closeness. The power in her letting him just — _see_ everything, like that, so full and complete and unhidden.

Serena returns carrying a dark towel and laughing. “I grabbed this from the bathroom like, _oh, better put it on the sheets_ , and then I was like, _duh, you’re a fucking magician_ —” She tosses it onto her bookshelf and drops the robe to the floor. There’s already a dark trickle of red sliding down her leg and Quentin feels his jaw slacken, a little, staring at it. “You can worry about the sheets later.”

She gets into the bed and there’s a funny moment where both of them start lying down on their backs — “Oh, sorry,” he says, lifting himself up, “I just assumed —”

She gives him a curious look. “You’re like, _into_ this into this, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he says. His mouth is dry. For a second he feels self-conscious, like maybe he’s wanting too much from her. “Is that — am I like weirding you out?” It is kind of weird, right? To not just not care but to be like, _wow it’s so hot that your vagina is bleeding_? Maybe —

“No?” she says, almost like she’s confused that he would ask.

Quentin relaxes, just a bit but enough for his arousal to seep into him and wash the rest of his tension away. “In that case,” he says, a little impatient now, and tips onto his side to kiss her mouth while he moves her fingers to to touch her bloody cunt, feeling with the heel of his hand bits of the hair there matted with it, with _her_ , heady with the sense of being allowed to trespass somewhere secret laid suddenly open for him. He strokes slow exploratory circles through her folds for a minute, enjoying just the touching and the way her breath stutters in his mouth like even now she’s startled this is actually happening. Then he crooks two fingers and thrusts them inside her, drawing out a satisfying low groan, feeling her pussy swollen and slick, slowing his movement when she starts to fuck herself from his hand, and Jesus, if this was as much as they did it’d be a great fucking night.

But she gasps “Okay,” and then “ _fuck_ ,” shifting to prop herself up, looking down at Quentin with eyes dark and serious. Quentin extricates his fingers, drags them along the inside of her thigh, watching himself smear sticky red on her skin in messy streaks. He rests his dirty hand on the flesh there and looks back at her face to see she’s staring at the place he’s holding her, looking not exactly hot for it but sort of fascinated, marveling at the sight.

“Okay,” she says again, voice husky, almost to herself; then, definitely to him — “This is going great, but I think I should probably fuck you now. Don’t you?”

Quentin can barely keep it together to nod.

She straddles him and he grips himself to help her lower herself onto his cock, slick and hot, starts moving her hips slow, almost excruciatingly slow. Quentin can hardly move, hands resting half-useless at her ass, his entire body buzzing like a static electricity. He can’t look away from the place their bodies meet, the thick warm blood spurting at the join between his dick and her cunt, and at the last edge of his awareness he can tell that Serena is watching _him_ , his panting slack-jawed face, how much he wants every piece of this, like she likes witnessing the indignity of his desire.

Desperate little noises are coming out of his mouth as she starts speeding up. Serena moves a hand to her own clit, two confident fingers stroking in firm circles where he can _watch_ , staining dark with red as she moves, red on the skin and in the beds of her nails, and — fuck, fuck — Quentin is trying to hold on as long as he possibly can to the edge while she takes what she needs, wild and loud like she gets when she’s close, and then she’s calling his name in her throaty voice, _Quentin, fuck, Quentin_ — and he’s coming hard into her while she shudders and slumps on top of him.

“Fuck,” she whispers into the crook of his neck. With a laugh she slides off of him and leans back to the side for a second, catching her breath. Quentin feels like he’s made of air. “I’m gonna go put my DivaCup back in,” she says, and gives him a kiss on the cheek with a quick tut to dematerialize the blood on her way out of bed.

When she gets back he’s halfway to dozing already. Usually sex doesn’t knock him out quite like this, but it’s like it reached into the tension that’s been clamping down arround him and let it loose, unleashing with it levels of belated exhaustion he had no idea he’d been dragging around. He gives Serena a sleepy smile as she slips into the bed wearing a worn pair of sweatpants and nothing on top, facing him with messy hair. Quentin reaches to give her a soft affectionate kiss, rests his hand at the side of her face. He feels calmer than he has in weeks and it feels like proof of — something, some way he can still be.

Then she says, “So what else are you into?”

Quentin freezes. “What do you mean?”

She shrugs one shoulder, looking just slightly self-conscious but in a friendly way. “I mean, it seemed like this was a lot of fun for you” — Quentin nods in assent, trying to keep the gesture light — “and, you know, it’s a lot of fun for me, when it’s fun for you, so — I don’t know, I figured now was as good a time as any to ask what you like.”

And like, Quentin’s thought about — things. He’s had fleeting images rush into his head when they’re together, feeling her fingers sweetly interlocking his while he’s beneath her and imagining briefly where that image could go, hearing her voice call out adjustments or requests — _faster_ or _fuck me?_ — and thinking about what else she could tell him that would make him weak in the knees. That urge like an itch crying _more, please more_ when she runs a hand through his hair or nips gently at his neck.

But, Jesus, he doesn’t want to make Serena deal with — _that_. It’s one thing to want her body in its uncelebrated fullness; it’s another to say, what, even, _It’s very hot for me to have sex about how fucked up I am?_ Even if he could clean it up into something like, palatably — naughty, or whatever, ugh, why are so many words about sex terrible — _I like it rough_ or _It’s fun when you take control_ or _a little light bondage_ or — he would know, is the problem. He would be inescapably aware of the contours of the particular nightmarish sexual iceberg of which he’d be showing her just the tip, heinous pun not intended. All the — weird, mean, vain, fucked up, embarrassing shit that does it for him. And the thing is, he doesn’t even want that, with her, not really — it’s just, it’s these impulses of his stupid body and his faulty subconscious, stupid and best ignored.

For just a second he bitterly resents Eliot, for dragging this shit out of him slowly, _patiently_ , across years and years, when Quentin really thinks he otherwise could have lived in contented ignorance of what his libido was up to in its hidden depths. But the moment passes quickly; Eliot didn’t make Quentin want any of this. It was a bizarre and convenient coincidence that their individual neuroses manifested in such erotically complementary ways. Eliot just managed to intuit that, fast.

Quentin just — he so desperately doesn’t want this, now. He really _likes_ her. He likes — the version of him that she knows.

Trying to sound casually playful he says, “Have I not seemed like I’m having fun? Because if so, like, that’s my bad.”

Serena rolls her eyes. “No, but you know what I mean —”

“Yeah, like —” His face is prickling hot. “I don’t know, I like — sex, and I like sex with you, like, a _lot_ , and, uh —” He shrugs. “I’ve, I’ve never, you know — really thought about it more than that.”

Serena studies his face, thoughtful. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Quentin attempts a sheepish smile. “Sorry if that’s not, like, super exciting.”

“I don’t need exciting,” she says softly.

He swallows. “Well. Lucky for me, then.”

She gives him a lopsided smile and a peck on the cheek, then rolls over so he can curl against her back to sleep. He doesn’t think he was imagining the slightest flicker of disappointment in her eyes — not because she wants him to be exciting, but because she wants him to be honest, and he’s a terrible enough liar that even less than three months in she could probably tell that he wasn’t.

Lying in the dark, holding her warm and close, Quentin feels — awful, worse than before. Like his sex-fueled reality vacation killed his tolerance and now that the totality of who he is has crashed back into him full force his body doesn’t know how to handle it. He feels like he’s doomed this, or worse — like it was already doomed and his only choice was to run out the clock on hiding or detonate it in one ugly blast by revealing the truth, sex as a miserable synechdoche for every other way he’s trying hopelessly to keep everything wretched and unwantable about him at bay. Like he’s back in the same trap he’s spent his whole life caught in, stuck between delusional escape and unbearable reality, between his idiotic fantasies and his pathetic failings. Fillory versus the high school cafeteria all over again. He wanted this to be real, he remembers, to know that every piece of their connection came from who he actually was. He’s fucked, he’s so fucked, why did he think he could do this?

*

Eliot has what he calls a “small birthday shindig” which Quentin absolutely does not want to go to but feels obligated to at least make an appearance at. It’s at the penthouse, and it is small; for Eliot, very restrained. There’s an assortment of glass bowls holding brightly colored punch spiked and marked with stars to indicate their strength; a table piled with carefully arranged bite-sized snacks; a funny mix in attendance of guests from Earth and a handful of trusted Fillorian visitors, looking wide-eyed and a little nervous at their surroundings. Quentin spends most of the evening compulsively shoving mini-quiches in his mouth and hovering in Julia’s periphery in the hopes of dissuading people from trying to start a conversation with him. It feels like he’s regressing but he feels like he’s about to shatter, here in a space he’s returned to before that for some reason feels now like hostile fucking territory, so he doesn’t feel that bad. The apartment seems suffocatingly thick with the echoes of his past self, hunched over on the couch or picking fights in the kitchen, looming as reminder and threat: This is you, say the images in his memory. You can’t pretend forever. It’s only a matter of time.

He wishes he hadn’t come.

Eliot finds him as he’s pouring a punch refill that he’s close to sober enough to know makes Too Many but drunk and miserable enough not to care about. “Hey, you. I feel like I haven’t seen you all evening.” Quentin lets himself be swept into a hug, leaving unsaid that this has been mostly by design. Eliot from a distance looks like he’s having a nice time. Quentin doesn’t want to ruin that. “Is Serena here?”

Quentin shakes his head. “She had a family thing. Something with her sister.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I was hoping to meet her.” Eliot sounds genuinely sorry, like he’s sad to have to postpone the Official Friendship Milestone of hanging out with his ex’s girlfriend. “Maybe next time we all get together.”

“We’ll see,” Quentin says thoughtlessly. Eliot’s brows pinch just slightly. Quentin doesn’t feel like being asked to elaborate on the fact that probably she’s going to dump him by then. He casts about for another topic. “It’s a nice party. I mean — you always throw good parties, but.” He sips his drink. “When you said small, I kind of thought you were just trying to get me to come.”

Eliot smiles. “Yeah, I don’t know. I kind of wanted to celebrate the last year of my twenties with people I actually like.”

“Makes sense.” Eliot looks so fucking fond, surveying the crowd. So — at peace. It makes Quentin want to scream. His stomach hurts. Probably too many tiny pastries.

“Thirty, though,” says Eliot, “that’s gonna be a blowout.” He wrinkles his nose. “I can’t believe I’m practically thirty. That sounds so old.”

“It really doesn’t,” says Quentin, rolling his eyes.

“I guess you’re right,” Eliot admits. “I just always thought —” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He doesn’t need to; they both know what goes there. For both of them. It kind of harshes the flow to say it.

Quentin studies Eliot, standing very still and a little uncomfortable the way he always is when he veers into unexpected emotional territory, but holding his head high, still. Surrounded here by people who love him, who will love him for a long, long time, because he’s fucking — done it, he’s doing it, he’s made himself better. And he was already so — how he was. It’s been a while since Quentin’s thought on who they were to each other, but he’s drunk and it’s a special occasion and the thought unbidden pops into his head: good. It’s good that Eliot is going to find someone else to spend fifty years with. Someone who won’t fucking — drag him down, from everything he’s going to be.

Quentin says, “Guess you thought wrong.”

Eliot gives him a small smile, looking touched. “I guess I did.” He frowns at something in the distance. “Oh, Rafe is investigating electricity again. I’m going to check in on that. I’ll see you later, Q.”

“Later,” Quentin says, but once Eliot is occupied he sets off to find one of the Pennys and ask for a ride home. He can’t stand it anymore, suddenly — being here, reminded constantly of who he was and always will be while everywhere he turns he can see how cleanly everyone else he knows is moving forward. All those pathetic Quentin-shadows fucking themselves over in ways he doesn’t even understand, telling him what he’s always known and hated to admit: that he can’t trust himself, still, that he never will. He needs to get out of here because he can’t shake the sense that something bad will happen if he stays, and the sick part is he almost wants it to, the sick part is always that it almost feels good when things finally go to fucking hell, but Eliot — Eliot doesn’t deserve to deal with that. Tonight, or ever.

*

It’s almost a perverse relief to get back to Fillory; it gives the swirling dust storm of his bitterness a point on which to concentrate. That’s how it fucking goes with him, right? Always looking for some excuse, craving the awful shit so bad he starts conjuring it into existence, because he doesn’t want to feel better; because the way he wants is broken, the things he wants are twisted and wrong. A sword to fall on, a story that’s really a lie. An elixir to make him a hero, a poison fucking apple to make his outsides match his insides, exactly that ugly and gnarled, and if he can’t then —

He hates this place, he hates this place, he wants to die, no he doesn’t, shut up, shut up, shut up.

Of course the casting is once again totally fucked. With Josh’s help and attention to peculiarities of Fillorian cultivation Quentin’s tweaked the spell extensively, but the knife is unimpressed; if it accepts his magic any easier than it did last time, it’s too subtle a shift for him to notice.

“I don’t know,” he says after finally closing out, if closing out is even what it can be called when the magic lingers like a brushfire, so — angry almost, or resentful. “It’s like it — I know this sounds nuts but it’s like it hates me. Like it’s pissed at me for even trying, or — like it doesn’t even _want_ to be fixed, I’ve never felt something broken that had so much resistance.” Belatedly he wonders if this is an issue of faulty internal circumstances, if the knife is picking up on how much he hates being here and having to come back for it — if it can tell that he resents it, too, for being the catalyst that ruptured the sweet little dream-bubble he’d so painstakingly constructed for himself and brought him back to ugly reality.

“Weird,” says Josh, frowning. “I really thought the onyx would help with that — especially combined with adding Duhrer’s Tail to the casting sequence. Maybe it’s just taking a while to absorb the current.”

“Maybe,” says Quentin, although he’d bet a hundred bucks right now it’s not. With dread mounting like bile up the back of his throat he says, “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.”

*

Like standing on the beach watching the tsunami rise, or being at sea during the first drops of the storm — that’s how he feels. Waiting for the natural disaster brewing under his skin to split him in two, break him apart. He sets his rules, his stupid fucking rules, and he follows them except when he doesn’t, but he mostly does, and it tastes like sand in his mouth, and what is wrong with him, that he can’t even hold on to the things he knows are good. This is what you wanted, he reminds himself desperately, trying to fall asleep in Serena’s bed and running four miles on a breezy day and sitting at book club and Traveling out with Penny to learn about access needs in rural Ohio; what the fuck has anything you’ve done since coming here been for, if not this? A life that’s his, that he knows how to keep. This is what he wanted, and even terrified to lose it, he can’t make it stick.

He dreams about the Seam, mending the mirror again and again and again. In the dreams the time dilates, ticks by viscous and impossibly slow, and in the frozen second before his magic kills him his mirrored self looks at him and asks, despairing or angry or simply confused, _Why?_ And some nights Quentin tells him _Because I want to save the world_ and some nights Quentin tells him _Because I want to die_ and he wakes up in a sweat and can’t fall back asleep because he doesn’t know why. Why that, or why any of the thousand stupid ways he’s found to ruin his own life. Why it’s like some part of him doesn’t even want to live.

*

Quentin was right that the spell wasn’t just taking its sweet time to settle. He’d guess it’s already as good as guaranteed that this will be another dud, but he feels like he owes it to Margo to try as hard as conceivably possible until he pulls it up. Reading the bitter, spitting magic beneath the dirt, he follows an impulse and cups his palms to conjure water. It takes a few tries, here, to grab the right ambient thread — there’s so _much_ magic, moving so thickly and so fast — but he manages it, filling his hands a few times and spilling the contents out onto the patch.

“Is that one of the ones you were telling me about? The — what did you call them? Vernacular spells?”

Quentin looks behind him to see Eliot watching him with a curious smile. “Yeah,” he says. “I got it from my friend Luisa — you’ve met her, right?”

Eliot nods, his eyes on Quentin’s hands. “Can I see it again?”

“Sure.” He obligingly performs the spell.

Eliot looks delighted, like he’s watching — well, a magic trick. But like, a really cool one. “Can you teach me? I mean, if you’re not busy.”

Quentin shrugs. “I can try. And I should probably hang around here for a while to make sure I didn’t accidentally cut the blue wire, so to speak.”

Quentin sits cross-legged on the grass before it occurs to him that Eliot in his royal finery might not want to do the same. But Eliot sits too, looking pleased. Quentin wonders what he came out here for. If he was just dropping by to check in because Quentin is obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown and it seems like setting foot here might be the thing that tips him over the edge. He tries to push that aside, gather his thoughts to explain. “So when you lift something — you don’t have to tut for it every time, right? Sometimes you can just — do it, or you might cast but you can kind of — adjust it, on the way, without, like, following the textbook you learned it out of.” He’s seen this happen — the way Eliot can just lift his palm or point a finger and an object will follow, almost like an extension of his graceful self.

Eliot nods. “Right.”

“That’s how it is when I fix things, sometimes,” says Quentin. “Or — that’s how it used to be. Anyway. So the best way to think of it is, you want to start by doing _that_ — that — connection with the magic, _before_ you do anything else. Almost like — like when it’s your discipline, right, something you really know cold, you can almost hear the magic. And with this it’s kind of like you want to — listen. On purpose.”

Eliot nods, taking this in. “So — show me?”

Quentin manages a smile. “Here we go.”

They wind up practicing with the fire spell that was the first thing Quentin learned how to do like this, once a few aborted attempts with water remind him what a pain in the ass that one was even on Earth. It’s harder in Fillory to zero in on what he needs, but Eliot has nothing to compare it to; maybe it won’t matter. Anyway it’s a decent distraction, holding the magic in that spot right _before_ , the way Luisa did when he was learning, playing around with how to turn the brightness up enough for Eliot to feel it without tipping it over into casting; more than once he underestimates Fillory’s threshold for activation and accidentally sets the fallen twig they’re using aflame. Quentin wasn’t in the mood for conversation, but this isn’t like that, exactly; it’s like a puzzle, finding the right amount of give and take as Eliot starts learning to latch in, figuring out what words might help him make that next leap or keep his timing sharp. He stays a little longer than he meant to, without noticing.

Eliot comes back the next day to practice, and the next — every day Quentin is in Fillory, meeting him in the garden. He starts making smoke on day three and lighting fire the day after, with a sun-bright grin of accomplishment that just for a second stirs some mix of fondness and pride and gratitude in the dormant place in Quentin’s heart where good things live; he keeps coming back after that, and they start working on filling the air with the scent of jacaranda. Quentin has the sense that it’s not really about the magic, and part of him feels guilty, like he’s accepting a favor he knows he can’t return. He doesn’t say anything, though. He takes it desperate and silent, another sweet thing he doesn’t deserve.

*

Eliot doesn’t show on harvest day; Quentin wonders idly about where he is while he puts off digging up the knife he knows is still not a knife. Meeting with an ambassador, maybe, or — trying to remember what else Eliot’s been talking about lately — talking with farmers and other vendors about improving the experience at the local markets. Something wholesome and useful. Quentin feels like a stain on the life of everyone he’s ever known.

As he predicted, the spell is a bust; the second he starts casting to close it Quentin is hit by a spew of magic almost vicious in its dysfunctionality; he should probably drop it and get someone to spot him before continuing, but he doesn’t. It’s stupid of him, dangerous, it’s fine, he’s fine. The shard of metal looks if anything worse than before. Half melted, scorched at the edges. Another failure, another bitter anchor pulling him back to this godforsaken place.

He heads into the castle to track down Twenty-three and get the fuck out of here but finds his feet carrying him to the kitchens first instead. There’s a previously opened bottle of wine from Earth left on one of the counters, presumably from Team Fillory’s personal stock; Quentin helps himself to a generously poured glass. He gets a day off from the rules, he thinks, after — this. Another fuck-up, another thing he can’t fix. Another fucking do-over in his miserably looping life, that sick sense of permanence gnawing at him beneath the frustration, that mix of _never_ and _always_ beating a tattoo on his bones. He’s so tired, he’s so fucking tired. He wants to sleep forever, he can barely sleep at night, he feels like his skin is about to crack like shattered porcelain from the effort of holding in the nuclear blast that’s forever threatening to blow his ribs apart —

“Hey, you. Staying for happy hour?”

Margo, relatively dressed down in a simple satin frock; smiling at him at the entrance, like nothing’s wrong. Because as far as she knows nothing is. Quentin sets the glass down, already nearly empty, taking care to be gentle. “Sorry, just — stressing about the knife. It didn’t work, again, and I don’t — I don’t know what the fuck else to, to tweak or add or take out or — I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to stress,” she says, brows slightly furrowed. “We all know you’re doing your best.” Quentin bites back from pointing out the more salient information, which is that it’s still not good enough. Never good enough, never right enough, never — “And mi castle es su castle. Anything important will always be labeled. Turns out I work with some snacky bitches.”

“Thanks,” he says.

Margo steps closer, tilts her head at him. He feels uncomfortably like he’s being examined. “You really could stay, you know. Today, or — or whenever. You don’t have to rush out every time you come by like the meter’s about to expire.”

Quentin makes himself nod. “I appreciate that.”

“Really,” she says, and there’s something funny in her voice. “You could — hang around, crash a couple nights. See what I’ve done with the place. Whitespire and beyond.” She gives him a grin that doesn’t totally match her eyes. “It’s kind of a fixer-upper, and it’d be about three hundred percent more sparkling if I had two percent more full-time magicians around, but given the circumstances, I think it’s really coming along, if I do say so myself.” He nods uncertainly at her, not sure how to respond, and her grin falters a little, like she really — wants him to see. Or almost even like she’s — hurt, that he hasn’t.

— Oh. Shit. Quentin feels guilt blooming alongside every other shitty feeling. “I’m sorry, Margo,” he says. “I — you’ve been doing an amazing job, obviously. The fact that things have been this stable for this long, even with the shortages and all the, uh — other stuff, from before — I mean, you don’t need me to tell you what that says, but — you know. It’s — great. It is. And I — it’s not that I don’t want to see, like, the fruits of your labors, it’s just —” He scrubs his face with his hands. “It’s weird, being here. Not — because of anything to do with you, or — it’s just — Fillory,” he finishes helplessly, waving it off.

Margo nods slowly, face turning serious. “I get that. It’s been a hard fucking road.”

“Yeah,” he says. Heavy with that feeling it gives him like he’s trapped under glass. Or stuck in a haunted house, and the ghosts are all him: these shards of himself still embedded in his skin like broken glass. “And it’s — it’s so fucking stupid, but whenever I’m back here, it’s not — like, I don’t think about the Beast and the Wellspring and the Fairies and the quest, or any of that. I just keep thinking, like —” His face burns before the words even reach his mouth, but he feels like he owes her an explanation. “This was supposed to mean something. I was supposed to mean something here. And I — didn’t, and that’s — fine, obviously, but — it feels weird. Just — remembering this, like, bullshit narrative I bought into, and how much I — wanted it to be true.” His throat, humiliatingly, is tight.

Margo studies him, biting her bottom lip. Quentin wonders if he miscalculated, if he should have just — shut himself up. “You know,” she says finally, “I wasn’t supposed to mean anything here. Hell, a girl like me?” She smiles, a little sad, a little wry. “I wasn’t supposed to mean anything anywhere. I wasn’t supposed to be worth more to anyone on any goddamn planet than a dirty tampon pulled out of my impure cunt.”

Quentin feels himself deflating with shame. “I know,” he says, eyes on the floor. “I know it’s not — like I said, it’s dumb.”

“I’m not telling you this as a secret code for _stop crying and get your head out of your taint_.” Margo pauses. “Well — maybe a little. But what I’m saying is — I do matter here. Because I got lucky. And because it was my fucking job to keep Eliot from killing himself with his own idiocy, and that meant I had to be all-in on this royalty shit from the start. And because I’m a gossipy bitch who hasn’t minded my business a day in my life. And because I have been an asshole and I have learned to make nice and I have clawed my way through literal and metaphorical mud and I have worked my perfect fucking ass off, day in and goddamn out, fighting to make it matter that once upon a time, the horny raccoon demographic chose me.” Margo comes right up to him, brushes a piece of hair out of his eyes. “Fillory’s like life. It sucks shit and it hurts like hell and it’s what you fucking make it, every day. I wouldn’t give it up for anything, now.”

Quentin swallows. Roughly he says, “I think that ship has sailed, for me.” For some reason he’s trying not to cry.

“I thought so, too,” she says softly.

He nods. He shouldn’t have stayed here; the wine is getting to his head. Margo’s being so kind but he’s so broken it feels like knifepoints along his spine thinking, obviously for Margo this world opened up, bloomed, transformed; for Margo, who wouldn’t? What is there that she couldn’t do, just by wanting it enough? That’s not him. It never was.

Margo studies him a long moment, thoughtful; inhales deep, exhales long. Then she says, “There’s someone I think you should talk to.”

*

She’s working in her garden, when Quentin walks through her magic — her strange, deep, eerie magic, strong yet fluid like molten steel — and stops for a second, at the edge of the clearing. There’s a hoe leaning against the little house’s stucco exterior; in her hands are a pair of well-used shears. Her hood is pushed back as she crouches by a plant, her thick cloak folding into mountain ridges around her on the ground. It’s a curious round little bush sprouting very tall a single large flower, white petals opening wide to reveal dark red tongues speckled periwinkle. He doesn’t think it’s a flower that grows on Earth.

He watches her tend to it, unhidden but not yet announcing himself: pruning, it looks like, clipping delicate bits and stepping back to examine it from a different angle and clipping some more. When the pieces fall she lets them stay on the grass below. Then she leans back and, apparently satisfied with the day’s work, straightens up and starts walking towards another bush, this one covered in needles and tiny blue flowers, until she catches sight of him in her periphery and startles, straightening up. She turns to him, a smile spreading wide on her face. “Quentin,” she trills in her cheerful lilt. “What a delightful surprise.”

Quentin gives a little wave. “Hi, Jane.”

*

“I do thank you for indulging my Britishness,” Jane Chatwin says as she sets a steaming porcelain cup on the table in front of him. “It’s funny the things you can never wholly shed — I stepped entirely out of the linear plane, and yet I still feel as though I’ve failed in my hospitality if I don’t offer someone a cup of tea.”

“Thank you,” says Quentin, picking it up to sip and immediately burning himself. She smiles at that, mirthful and fond. “I like your… house?”

“I think of the cottage at the Clock Barrens as sort of a home for wayward time magic,” she says. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

“Sure.” Quentin looks around small room: the naturalist prints on the walls, the latticed windows with delicately patterned cushions nestled at their corners, the wooden shelves stacked with all manner of mysterious implements and brass trinkets, tattered hardcovers and vases with flowers, ceramic knickknacks and half-melted candles. “This is where you live, though, right?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she says cheerfully. “After all, can anything really be said to live that shall never truly die?”

“Uh huh.” There’s something like — almost like a fly, buzzing around always just out of sight. A fly in the ambient, nagging at him but impossible to catch. Quentin shakes the sensation off. “So — like, from your perspective, has this already happened? Since this is where — all moments exist at once, or whatever?”

“Technically,” she says. “But when Margo started making her visits I thought it might be prudent to create a kind of — filter for my consciousness, anchored in your timeline, that I can dip in and out of like a nice pair of shoes. I must admit it’s been enjoyable, dabbling once more in experiencing linear time in a single direction.”

“That’s — kind of breaking my brain,” says Quentin, “but, uh — I’m glad?”

“It’s difficult to process,” Jane says understandingly. “Especially for those accustomed to unidirectional time.”

“Yeah. That’s definitely — I’m definitely that.” Quentin attempts his tea again, takes a sip. It’s — fine. He’s not much of a tea drinker, but she’d seemed really excited. Early Grey, he thinks, strong. There’s a tiny birdhouse nailed to the off-white wall, painted bright red, with a fat wooden bird poking its head out.

“I must confess,” says Jane, her own teacup held elegantly aloft, “I thought if ever I saw you again, you would be angry with me.”

Quentin blinks at her, startled. “Angry with you? Why?”

“Well, Eliot was furious the first time he stopped by,” she says. “And I can’t say I blame him. He thought it was my fault that you were dead. Said I’d ruined your lives, dragged you into my mess and left you all to clean it up, started you on the road to ruin. I had my reasons for doing what I did, of course, but —” She shrugs. “It was hard to argue with him. I thought you might feel the same.”

“Oh,” he says. “No — no, I’ve never thought of it like that.”

“How do you think of it?”

He shrugs. “I kind of — don’t, I mean — you were doing what you felt like you had to do, and you were pretty much right about that, and I — kept getting in the way, I guess, so — it’s not like you had a choice.” He feels himself flushing, slightly, to think of — thirty-nine hims, each as pathetically eager as the last to live out the story he could believe picked him.

“There’s always a choice,” she says, soft and a little — wistful, maybe. “But you certainly did stack the deck.”

Quentin looks down at his tea. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.” Jane sets her cup down and stands to retrieve something from one of the shelves — a narrow box of polished wood inlaid with geometric patterns, brass hinges along its side. She opens it to reveal a chess board patterning the interior, tiny pieces secured by magic in their starting positions. “Do you play?”

“Not well,” says Quentin, “but I know the rules.”

“Excellent.” Jane beams at him. “I thought we could have a match and you could tell me how things have been, since last we met. Margo told me when they brought you back to life, but this consciousness hasn’t heard much news since.” She moves a white pawn forward, looking at him expectantly.

“Oh,” he says. “Uh — well I live in California now.” He mirrors her movement on the board.

“Fascinating,” she says, moving another pawn. “How did that come about?”

Moves a different pawn, immediately doubts that was the right call. “It’s kind of a long story.”

“I’ve got time.” Jane gives a hearty laugh. “Oh, I _do_ enjoy saying that.”

And she’s not wrong, so Quentin — tells her. Not, like, everything — he cuts most of the relationship drama, and generally sticks to the PG-rated version of events where applicable — but more than he was expecting, when he started out. He tells her that he came back to life after a death that felt like the best thing he’d ever done, and he felt worse than he had before; he tells her he left New York because he’d destroyed his ability to stay there and hurt the people he cared about in the process. He tells her he spent two months trying to burn whatever was left of his life to the ground, and he wound up staying in California because it turned out at least one piece of him wanted to try doing something else. They wind up playing several rounds, mostly because Jane keeps kicking his ass in humiliatingly short order, and he keeps going, lulled by the rhythms of the game or propelled by some confessional impulse he didn’t know he had or maybe just shocked out of his ability to filter by the utter weirdness of hanging out with Jane Chatwin in her cottage at the end of time — about almost drowning right after he’d decided to live, and sweating his way through a San Diego summer; about meeting a selkie and learning to do magic in a way he didn’t know existed and untrapping some ghosts, just a little bit. About how running sucks, but he sort of likes it now, and about his friends on the West Coast, and book club’s favorite hedge bar to hit up for happy hour. About Eliot, the contours of their impossible story, and about what a fucking dick he’s been to every single person he loves. About becoming a very small part of the effort to spread magic far beyond the reach of the people who decided it was their job to decide how small it should be. About meeting someone new. About his broken magic and the unbroken coffee maker and the journal where an article is going to be published with his actual name on it like his spell is worth reading about, the spell that’s brought him to Fillory, back to where he began.

“It sounds like you’re doing well for yourself in your second chance at life,” Jane says when he runs out of steam.

Quentin lets out a bitter laugh before he can stop it. “You’d think, right?”

She tilts her head at him. “I would. But you wouldn’t?”

He stares at the board. “You know the worst part of getting what you want?” She waits for him to continue. Heaviness settling into his chest, he says, “When it’s not good enough.” He shakes his head. “Everything I wanted, everything I — couldn’t find in New York, or came to California to figure out, I got. Things — should be good. I should feel good. But I feel — awful, lately, all the time, and the worst part is it’s like — if this couldn’t make me happy, what could? I fixed my life, and I can’t even enjoy it, because I keep thinking about — all the fucked-up things that came before, the shit I pulled, and how —” Quentin swallows, trying to keep his voice steady. “That part hasn’t changed. It’s still — me. And I have spent — so much of my life running, and looking for — secret doors, and magic stories, right up until I found one to fucking kill myself in, and I don’t —” He wipes his eyes, embarrassed to be crying in front of her. “I just feel like, I’m always gonna fuck it up again. Because that’s what I do. I break things, I run away, I — find these ways to tell myself the story that makes it okay, instead of figuring out how to actually be okay, these stories where I’m, where I’m brave, or I’m special, or I matter, and then the story’s bullshit and I’m just —” He sits back, defeated. “I’m just the asshole who wanted to be something he wasn’t so bad he tricked himself into believing it could be true.”

Jane regards him for a long time. He avoids her gaze, trying to get himself under control. She starts to talk, then changes her mind and gets up to fetch a book from one of the shelves again — stiff yellowing pages, faded cloth on the spine, but Quentin would recognize it anywhere: Fillory and Further Book One, _The World in the Walls_ , a first edition.

“It’s an odd thing, to become a story, isn’t it?” she says, flipping through the pages. “I didn’t do it on purpose, of course — but nonetheless it interests me. _Jane, the family skeptic_ — I suppose I was. If you’d asked me I might have come up with something better — Jane, the one who liked to pick fights, maybe, or Jane, the family scientist, until her life’s course changed — Jane, the resident historian, perhaps. I didn’t dislike wonder; I simply — admired reality. Perhaps a touch precociously. God knows if I didn’t, I never would have managed this” — she gestures to her bubble outside of time — “magic key or not. This was work, you know.”

“I can imagine,” Quentin says, attempting to follow her point.

“But in the books, Martin likes wonder,” says Jane, “so Jane can’t. Even though Martin was very good in maths, actually. Martin is melancholy, so Jane has to be bright and shining and full of vigor, always. And I was, often. But this Jane never cries because she’s a little girl who misses her parents. And I was, and I did.” She smiles. “I don’t fault the books for that — who would read a story filled with pages upon pages of weeping for a cause that had no solution or redress except time itself? Certainly I wouldn’t. How dreadfully boring. In fiction allowances must be made. But it’s not a real person, between the covers. Not quite.”

Quentin works to piece together what she’s saying, trying not to get frustrated; he’d forgotten her cryptic streak. He looks for words that are less transparent than _What does this have to do with me?_ “So — I mean I know. That’s what I’m saying, is — these other Quentins, like, the guy who died some big hero, they’re — that’s not real.”

“So why,” she says, “do you want him to be? Why do you want to make him real — the storybook Quentin, the Quentin out of a fable?”

Quentin shrugs. “Because. I — because he’s better. Because he’s braver, and, and smarter, and more important, and — I mean everyone wants that, in a way, and I just never — outgrew it.”

“Many people do want to be brave and smart and important,” Jane says gently. “But most of them don’t follow that wish into death.”

Quentin feels his teeth clench. “Yeah, well — I mean that’s part of it too, right? I can’t — I can’t fucking _deal_ , I can’t do what other people do, I have to be some bullshit hero or else I’m — taking my ball and going home, in like, the most dramatic way possible.”

“Perhaps,” she allows. “But Quentin — think again about that storybook Quentin. What is it you like so much about him? Is it that he’s brave, or smart, or important? Or is it much simpler than that?”

“I —” His first impulse is to say yes, all of the above. But she’s right, he realizes. Looking at his life — all the dreams of escape, all the wished-for secret doors — what he wanted all that time was so much smaller than that. 

“He’s not me,” Quentin says. “And that’s — that’s the story I want. The story I’ve always wanted. Not — it’s never even mattered, who he actually was, just — just that he was someone else. Someone else with a different story, because in my story —” He clamps his mouth shut.

Jane asks, “What’s your story, Quentin?”

He shakes his head; he can’t say it. It’s too humiliating, too small, and somehow too big, overwhelming him with its reach. Because his life is rising before him now, every aching night alone and all the days spent hiding, every flinch and every fuck-up and every failure, the dread that’s been choking him and all those impossible questions repeating endlessly like ghosts. All answered now in one brutal stroke, and it’s so fucking stupid, because he knew this before, didn’t he? He’s always known it, like he knows his own name. Something familiar and easy to speak. But it’s like someone lit a torch in the dungeon he’s kept himself in, and every ridge of cold stone he knew so well he’s suddenly seeing for the first time.

“In my story,” he says, voice breaking, “I’m just this person that I fucking hate. That’s — all I am, that’s everything I am. And that’s why —”

Every time he’s run, everything he’s broken, every way he’s found to abandon his own life; all the times he’s given up before trying, all the places he’s written himself out of someone else’s life without even noticing he had anything to leave; every time he’s played the hero and every time he’s tried to die — all of it circling back and back and back to something as simple as this: he hates himself. He always has. That’s the story under all his other stories, the one he’s bent his entire life into shapes small and mean enough to fit. The one he keeps proving, over and over, because it’s the only one that feels real.

“That’s why I fuck things up,” he says. “That’s why I can’t change. Because I — oh, god —” He hunches over on himself, crying hard now, feeling idiotic because like — he knew this, he’s known this, he thinks about it constantly. It shouldn’t still hurt like this. And yet. And yet.

Jane lets him tire himself out; when he wipes his nose to look at her again she’s looking at him with an expression sad and concerned and a little bemused. It’s a very English response, he thinks, to these American hysterics. “So now you know,” she says.

“But I already knew,” he says, voice thick. His face stings from the tears.

She squints at him. “Did you?”

“I —” He did. But he thinks of Julia, then, with a rush of love and guilt that almost flattens him again — of the clock that doesn’t start ticking until the mourning begins. Tragedy and time, and tragedy that freezes time, traps your heart in amber, until you make space to let the grief in. He feels physically sick, stomach knotted and every muscle wrung out. He thinks he did know, in his head — in mind and his thoughts and his words — but not in the rest of him, maybe. The softer parts beneath. Maybe he’s tired after years of struggling to keep the other pieces of him from finding out. “I don’t know.”

She nods. “It’s a hard story to live with. For anyone.” A shot of pain flashes across her composed face and Quentin wonders if she’s thinking about — he wonders who she’s thinking about.

“But I don’t know any others, Jane,” he says. “That’s all I’ve fucking got.”

“So make one,” she says. “Like your spell, with the coffee maker.”

“I don’t know how,” Quentin pleads.

“You didn’t know how to do that either,” says Jane. “But you figured it out. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you know the alternative, Quentin.” He stares at her, uncomprehending. “It’s either find a new story, or die.” She picks up her knight and moves it in its crooked path on the board. “Checkmate, I’m afraid,” she says, and smiles.

*

He’s emptied out, after that. He goes back to California and lies in bed feeling like he’s on the table in an anatomical theater, flayed open waiting for his dissection to be displayed, and he’s the corpse and the audience, too, every pair of sharp eyes taking in his own undoing. Like he has nothing, is nothing, ghostly and inert. He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t move. He shuts off the lights and lies in bed, watching the walls brighten and dim with the unceasing passage of time. All that time, carrying him forward and never any further away from where he began. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to run and no way to hide anymore, because he knows, he finally knows. The creature in the night, the monster under the bed, every meaningless terror he’s allowed to prevent him from starting his actual life — it was just him, all along. No one else. Just him.

He cancels on plans with Serena, claiming sudden illness, feeling like shit about it in a distant and unreal way. Like he’s watching himself, the doctor lifting up the flap of skin to reveal the ugly red beneath — this is what you do, this is what you always do, this is how it works. Here: you have a choice and you’re choosing the worst option, because you’d rather stay stuck as this person you hate than do what it takes to be better. Because you tell yourself a lot of stories about what you want, but in the end you’ll always come back here, beause nothing else feels right, because nothing else feels real. And why not? Why the fuck not, if —

He turns off his phone, he barely eats. He sleeps until he can’t, lies in bed feeling like shit until he passes out. Dreams of nothing, vague snatches of misery and guilt, wakes up sweating anyway. He scrolls endlessly through lists of regrets, holding each one up to the light, wincing at how in sharp relief they look the same. How he’d decided literature was frivolous, so he committed himself to spending seven years studying a subject he didn’t even like and filled himself with such dread he wound up in a fucking mental hospital. His preadolescent shyness, the octave-jump in his voice that let everyone else know he was afraid of being seen. The way he’d torpedoed things with Alice, the first time, before they ever had a chance to be good because he was sure, so sure, that once she figured him out it would be over anyway, and how easily he’d accepted Eliot’s clean dismissal when fifty goddamn years had been more than long enough to figure out Eliot was almost as fucked up as he was and this was exactly the kind of shit he would pull when things got real for him. His dad — all the times his dad said he wanted Quentin to be happy, and Quentin turned it into some kind of attack. Every way his dad wanted to help, to fix what could be fixed, and Quentin hated looking at his own brokenness too much to even let him try. Fucking — James’s twenty-first birthday party, study hall hours with Caitlin who wore Star Trek shirts, Margo’s coronation — all the places he’s written himself out of his life, the ways he’s worked over and over to shape his world to match his desolate heart, because it was easier than believing in any alternative. Julia — god, Julia — the sullen jealousy in his stomach seeing her eat lunch with a girl he didn’t know, avoiding her in the halls and brooding silently at parties when she was with her cross-country friends, his endless stony distance when she met James, just friendly enough that he could maintain plausible deniability when she tried to tell him this was something real, watching her create faltering sparks that were more than any magic he’d managed on purpose in his life and telling her to forget it, forget the truth of what they were, because it let him live a little longer in the story where he’d been chosen at last. And his disastrous fucking second life, the humiliating freefall of last spring and all the wasted seething anger at everyone on earth less miserable than he was and above all at Eliot and Julia, Julia, the two people he couldn’t forgive for loving him when he didn’t want to be loved, for refusing to give up on him no matter how hard he tried to make them.

Unforgivable — always, from the beginning, in his own heart unforgivable, for everything and nothing, for being who he was. The dark mirror that created a life reflected to earn every drop of shame. The whole of him, the center of him, his warped self as a closed fucking loop.

*

“Okay. Wake up.”

Luisa’s leaning against the doorway, a plastic bag in her hand, eyes boring down on him. She looks — pissed. Quentin sits up, stomach flipping. “What’s up?”

She raises an eyebrow meaningfully. “Serena stopped by.”

Fuck. “Oh, shit.”

“Apparently you have the stomach flu?” Luisa purses her lips. “News to me. Sounded like a real bad case, from what she said. She was concerned.” She holds up the bag. “Brought you soup.”

Quentin wants to die. It doesn’t even feel worth noticing at this point, but — it’s true, still or again. “I —” He doesn’t know what to say. He wants to ask what Luisa said, but he feels like that’s not allowed. God knows he doesn’t have the right to ask if she told the truth.

“I didn’t spill,” Luisa says. She doesn’t sound happy about it. “And you didn’t ask me for relationship advice, so I don’t need to explain to you that if I found out a guy had faked a fucking virus to get out of talking to me, I’d dump him faster than you could say red flag, motherfuckers. But that was a fucked up position to put me in without even warning me.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think she’d —”

“Don’t,” Luisa says.

Quentin nods. “You’re right. That’s not — I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, and I won’t — I won’t drag you into my bullshit again.”

Luisa takes this in, nodding slowly. “Okay.”

“You can eat the soup,” he says. “If you want.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not gonna eat your girlfriend’s soup.”

“We’re not, like, official,” says Quentin, although the look Luisa gives him after that is — yeah, fair enough. “I’m not hungry, anyway.”

Luisa comes in, sits at the chair at his desk. “You go through these phases where you give off these very intense vibes of like, I Need Space, and that’s — you know, I get that, but — what’s with you lately? Did something happen?”

Quentin makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh. “No. Or — I don’t know. Maybe. Not really.”

“Is it just like —” Luisa gestures in the direction of her brain.

“It’s — maybe,” he says. “Or — I mean but isn’t that like, everything? Like isn’t there something kind of tautological and weird about this, like, brain/self dichotomy?”

She shrugs, wry. “I’m not a philosopher.”

“Neither am I.” He leans over, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. His hair is — gross. Like, real gross.

“I just thought — I don’t know,” she says, “things seemed to be going pretty well for you.”

“They were,” he says. “That’s like, the problem.”

Luisa asks, “What do you mean?”

It doesn’t seem worth explaining. “Nothing. I don’t know, I — I’m not in a great place. Don’t listen to me.” He makes himself stand up .”I should take a shower.”

“Okay,” she says, doubtful. “If you want to talk, or — just hang out, later — you know where to find me, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. And — sorry, again.”

She shrugs. “Everyone fucks up.”

Not like me, he thinks, vicious, acid. He doesn’t say it, though.

*

He spends a long time in the shower, hot water stinging his skin pink, right on the line between pleasing and punishing. Thinking about how many times he’s had to learn the lesson that his fuck-ups are never his alone, how long it’s taken and might take still for it to stick. How it’s collapsed again and again under the story at the center of him, the story that keeps him alone even when he should know better. Like he’s spent his life thinking he was trapped only to find the door’s been open the entire time, and the only thing trapping him on this dark side has been him.

Afterwards he steps out into the humid bathroom and towels off and gets dressed. In his room he sits at his desk, head in his hands. He needs to get himself together. He needs to get himself together because if he doesn’t the mess of him is going to start spilling back out onto other people, he can’t — he can’t do that again, he’s so tired of being that way. And he needs to get himself together because he knows Jane fucking Chatwin was right: if he doesn’t, he’ll die.

Quentin lifts his eyes to the mirror on the wall, staring at his face, familiar and alien, and thinks about the Seam. How he’d looked at his reflection and seen a hero; how he’d looked at the broken mirror and seen escape. How it’s taken him this long to see those twin desires for what they are: sides of a coin, one and the same. Each a way to abandon his own loathsome self. The relief he’d felt, knowing he wouldn’t have to be Quentin anymore. And the awful pull, realizing — he doesn’t want to die, now. He really doesn’t. But he doesn’t want that, either — to be himself. He doesn’t know how to want that.

Who fucking would?

Quentin shifts his gaze to the corner of his desk. The warped piece of ceramic he set down a year ago is still there and he picks it up, feeling its smoothness, the uneven edge of its perimeter, its odd curving shape like a snapshot of some living thing expanding. He saved this for a reason, he remembers. Proof of concept, proof of growth. Proof of magic — that it was his.

He looks at his reflection again. He’s spent his whole life hating this view. So much that sometimes it feels like he doesn’t even know what he looks like. Like he can’t stand to look at himself long enough to learn.

Quentin scrubs at his face, sits for a moment with his eyes covered. Noticing how the stillness and the dark feels like home, like truth, like where he belongs. Then he gets up and finds his phone to turn it back on.

He should text Serena, at the very least thank her for the soup; he should text Eliot, apologize for disappearing without saying goodbye and ignoring his calls; he should text Julia, set her at ease. He doesn’t do that, though. He texts Penny, asking for a ride.

*

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, last time I was here.”

Jane moves her bishop, takes his knight. “Oh?”

“About —” Quentin keeps his eyes on the chess pieces, although his mind’s not really in the game. There’s that weird — buzzing again in her cottage, like a shadow in the magic, or a whisper he can’t make out. “About how I have to, to make a new story. And like — I think you’re right, is the thing. I think — clearly, like, the story in my head is fucked, so fucked it got me killed. And I don’t, I don’t want to — do that again. But I don’t, um — I’ve been this way for so long — for my whole fucking life — and I just — I don’t know how. To, to change.” He moves his rook, capturing a pawn. “So I don’t know if — I thought maybe you might have some advice, or — since it was, you know. Your idea, or whatever.”

Jane moves her queen, one square over, then sits back to look at him with a thoughtful smile. “Do you remember the story of Ellis Wirth-Downs?”

Quentin’s stomach tenses. “The Madness Maker. Yeah, of course.” A thought occurs to him. “Was that you? In the — the hospital, the fake one in my head, in the spell back at Brakebills?”

“To a certain degree, I suppose one could say it was,” Jane says, which is — not super clarifying. Quentin decides to leave it. “What do you remember?”

“Uh —” Quentin rakes his hair back, trying not to roll his eyes. “Cursed to do only game magic, made puzzles with no solutions and games no one else could win.”

“Right. He — hold on.” Jane takes _The World in the Walls_ from its place on her shelves and starts looking for the page. “The man was a monster,” she says almost to herself, “but he could turn a phrase. Here — _The Madness Maker didn’t play for the joy of winning, just the fear of losing. The real curse was, he only played when he could win, which cut him off from the surprise, horror, sadness, and wonder of life._ ” She looks up. “That’s nicely put, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, ducking her gaze. “ I get it, like — the parallels are not subtle here. It — it definitely applies. And it — like, yeah, living that way will definitely make you feel — completely fucking crazy, after long enough.”

“Do you remember,” she asks, “what the Jane in the books says is his one way out?”

Quentin heaves a sigh. Reluctantly he quotes, “Stop playing. Start living.” He shakes his head. “I know, but that’s like — that’s like the whole problem, that’s what I’m saying. I want — I want to start living. I don’t want to keep playing this never-ending game that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t want my existence to be meaningless because I’m too fucking chickenshit to make it anything else. I want to, to feel like a real person in the actual world. I want to — do things, and have a fucking future, and not be so goddamn afraid of my own shadow that I waste my entire life — hiding, and running away.”

“Mmm,” says Jane. “So I —”

“I mean,” he goes on, too wound up now to stop, “I’m so fucking — _tired_ of being like this, of fucking — fighting myself every step of the way, and I don’t — I want to stop. But I’ve spent my whole life now basically — proving myself right, over and over, that I actually am just as — awful and selfish and fucked up and broken as I think I am. I’ve hit like a million fucking forks in the road and picked the worst option because that’s what made sense to me, because it — matched what I hated about myself, because it was what I would do if I was totally alone in the world, or a coward, or an asshole, or like totally dysfunctoinal beyond repair, or just a real piece of shit. And it’s like — I mean textbook self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Because maybe there was a time when none of that was true, but — it’s true now, because I fucking made it true.”

“Quentin —”

“And I want,” he says, “I want so badly to believe I can make it untrue. That I can — change it, fix it, find a better way. I want to be, like, a good friend and a decent person and maybe even fucking happy once in a while. I want to think that’s, like — possible. And I know that like — yes, okay, I’m the fucking Madness Maker, and I keep making my own goddamn madness, and so I need to — stop. And the thing that’s stopping me is that I’m afraid. I’m afraid of — life. The, the surprise and the horror and whatever else you said, like —” He swallows, throat tight. “Like yeah, I am. I’m fucking terrified of life, because I’ve fucked it up so many times, and I know that — everyone fucks up, but — not everyone fucks up like me, okay. Objectively, like, my fuck-ups are — somewhere on the left side of the bell curve. Probably at least a standard deviation over. So — so the answer isn’t to just decide, okay, I’m a fuck-up, and I’m going to fuck everything up, because that — doesn’t work, and actually just makes me fuck up more, and it’s just, like, a psychological coping mechanism that makes me feel subconsciously safe, or whatever, I get that. The answer is to just — start living. But I don’t — I don’t know how. I don’t know how to live with it, and I don’t know how to turn it into something else, and I don’t know how to be less afraid, and I don’t know — like, I don’t even know how I’m supposed to believe that I _can_.”

Jane waits a moment, looking faintly amused. “Have you finished?”

“I — yeah,” he says. “Sorry, I — interrupted you.”

She tilts her head. “That does sound difficult,” she says gently. “Incredibly so. One could make the argument that it is impressive to have survived this long, feeling as you do. Perhaps even that there is something to admire in your willingness to name out loud this thing which causes you so much pain.” Quentin shrugs, uncomfortable. It doesn’t exactly feel like something to brag about. “But that’s not what I was going to say.”

“I know,” he says. “You were going to say — what you said to Ellis Wirth-Downs. Stop playing, start living. But —”

“Ssh,” she says, finger to her lips. Quentin closes his mouth. “You’re awfully confident sometimes for someone who hates himself. It’s not one of your finer qualities.” He brushes his hair out of his face, feeling embarrassed. “Quentin, I wasn’t going to tell you to start living.”

“You weren’t?” he says.

She shakes her head, smiling quizzically. “No. From what you’ve told me, and the things you’ve said, and the way you’ve talked about what you’ve been doing since last I heard news of you — it very much sounds like you don’t need that advice. What I was going to say is — you already are.”

Quentin stares at her. “I don’t understand.”

“Look at your life,” she says. “Does it look like the life of someone who’s hiding from the world?”

“Well — no,” he admits, “but I still _feel_ —”

“You feel all sorts of things, I know,” she says. “But just for a moment, don’t look at that. Don’t even look at what you have, all these things that should make you happy. Just look at what you’ve done. What you’re doing. Who exactly it is that you’ve been acting like. Don’t say anything — just let it in. For a moment.”

Quentin fights back the urge to argue, the impulse to disappear. Half out of habit he cups his hands together to fill them with water. Steadying, grounding, in time with his lungs. He thinks: I’m making magic, magic I had to learn. Magic I never even knew existed. And it starts to fill him up — he can fill a room with the scent of jacaranda now, and pull fire out of the ambient with a flick of his wrist. He fixed a coffee maker using a spell no one had ever cast, and someone thought that was interesting enough to read about. Even if he gets his discipline back, his magic will never be the same. The way he thinks of it will never be the same. When he thinks of it now he doesn’t think of Brakebills and Fillory; he thinks of people he hadn’t met two years ago doing things he had no idea were possible, and people he’s known a lot longer working to change the way magic lives in people’s lives. Collaboration and cooking pancakes. Listening and learning to be patient. And magic isn’t all that he is, but it’s part of his very core; it touches everything else. If his magic has changed —

— he must have, too.

He watches the water and thinks: I’m breathing. Breathing in, breathing out. Breaths like steps, one after the other. He thinks: I can run six miles now, and it’s not even that hard. And he feels it, vibrant and rich like ambient, filling his lungs, spurring his pulse. The life he’s assembled, but more than that — the person he’s become, to live it. The broken pieces of himself he’s had to grow into new living things, like seedlings under the soil. Tragedy plus time, plus patience, plus trial and error and trial again. Plus sunlight and water and a dozen other things. Plus luck and plus love, pouring into him and shining out.

“I —” It feels like a spell he can almost cast, something nearly close enough to touch that might yet be fumbled. “Maybe,” he says, afraid still to injure this — half-belief, feather of hope. “Maybe you have a point.”

“Well, that’s not the resounding endorsement I was hoping for,” says Jane, eyes twinkling, “but I suppose it’s a start.”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. He fills his hands once more, empties them out. He thinks: maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s better than never, at least. “I guess it is.”

*

He has another meeting with Penny, connecting to a guy at a hedge house in Massachusetts. It’s bitterly fucking cold there, and Quentin starts shivering as soon as they Travel, rushing into the house. They talk about transportation needs in the area, cryo work that could be useful to stabilize especially for the winters and the increasingly hot summers. Quentin takes notes, half-wanting to pause to run a cryo spell himself, although he doesn’t know any simple ones that would just keep his fingers from stiffening up. He’s really got to start organizing these things; they have a couple more meetings coming up and it’s only going to be more of a mess, trying to find usable common threads if he hasn’t even sat to survey what they’ve found so far. Maybe that’ll be his project next week. He needs to get back into — something. Projects, or something else that isn’t what he’s been doing.

It’s not until they get outside that Quentin stops short, shivering in the wind, realizing suddenly where they are. “Oh, shit.”

Penny looks at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, just — déjà vu, kind of,” he says. “Julia and I were here, when we were traveling — it was one of the first places we stopped outside New York.”

“Huh.”

Quentin looks at the house — two stories, light blue. White shutters. He’d been here — he might have met that guy before, briefly — and he’d come back that night, hadn’t he? In the back of a cab, with — shit, what was her name? He remembers her olive-green knit cap and her wide eyes, the way her body opened for him and the sounds she made, a little too eager; he remembers the way she looked at him, like he was a hero, and how he liked that too much to care that she was wrong. He’d fallen asleep in her bed pretending to be someone else, and woken up trembling and ready to run before he had to be himself. And now he can’t remember her name.

“You sure you’re good?” says Penny behind him, sounding doubtful.

Quentin shakes himself, turns back to face him. “Yeah. It’s just — weird. That — double-vision thing you said. Not like — I mean, this was last year, obviously. But it wasn’t — it wasn’t a great time for me.” Hearing his own words shocks a laugh out of him. “Like — understatement of the fucking millennium, there.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” says Penny. “I wasn’t there, obviously, but — around the time you left, you know, you seemed…” He trails off, like he’s trying to find a polite way to put it but really stuck on the problem.

“Like a fucking mess?” Quentin offers. Penny’s eyebrows shoot up. “Like a complete shitshow? A walking goddamn corpse? Like a garbage person, a person with a brain made of literal garbage, left out on the corner in fucking August?” He laughs again, weirdly buoyant. “Did I maybe seem like I was falling apart every fucking second of every day? Like I was trying to force the world to give me permission to set myself on fire by winning an Olympic medal in being a douchebag? Oh, God.” He covers his face with his hands, wondering for a moment if he might cry. He was so fucked up. He was so fucked up! He can’t stop laughing. “I was so fucked up,” he says, almost marveling at it, because like — he knew, even then; that was why he’d left. But he didn’t _know_. Not like he knows, looking at — himself, his past, his entire life before where he stands right now. That place seems so far from here.

Penny is watching this, skepticism on his face, like maybe Quentin is acting completely fucked up now, actually. Which he is, he’s totally fucked up, but — but still. Still it’s so distant, right now, for now. It feels like something is leaving him, or like it’s already left and he’s only noticing now. ”Do you wanna, like —” Penny hesitates. “Talk about it?”

“I really don’t, actually,” says Quentin, “but — you wanna get a drink? There’s a hedge bar in the city we went to last time, it’s not bad.”

Penny shrugs. “Yeah, sure.”

“I can’t stay that long,” says Quentin. “I gotta get back and start organizing these notes.” Organize his notes, text a bunch of people back, buy Luisa dinner as penance for his bad behavior — he has a lot to do, to get his life together. His _life!_ “But — better than nothing, right?”

“I guess it is.” Penny gives him a dubious smile, like he’s maybe humoring Quentin because he thinks Quentin is about to lose his mind again. Quentin can live with that. He feels like can live through fucking anything. Or maybe like he already has.

*

Friday night, Serena’s apartment after they spent the evening watching the staged reading of her friend’s play about, like science and feminism. Fully dressed still, both of them, and it’s kind of nice, Quentin thinks, to have undressed each other enough to start lingering here, enjoying a slow ramp-up. It makes him feel weirdly young and adult at the same time, wide-eyed enough to be easily pleased and old enough to appreciate it.

Serena kisses him with her body lined up on top his, presses her weight against him, and — there it is, again. That voice from somewhere deep in him hissing _more, please_ , the image of her above pinning him down to the mattress, the shock of fear and desire to think of her watching him, seeing how much he’d like it — he freezes, for a second, caught by the dimensions of what he wants.

“You okay?” she asks, lifting her face a bit and brushing her hair out of the way while she’s up there.

“Yeah,” he says. He gives her a smile to show he means it, brings a hand to the side of her face. He pauses, feeling her soft skin. He likes her, a lot. He likes the version of himself she knows. And maybe he should stop there; maybe it should be enough that he managed to pull himself together before he fucked this up for real. He’s spent so long falling for every story except the one that has him in it — his actual, unvarnished self. So fucking long convinced that wouldn’t ever be a story worth telling and in his heart he believes that, still; still he looks at it and he sees a story ugly and small and unwanted. But he remembers — how did Jane put it? He’s very confident, for someone who hates himself. Maybe he’s wrong.

He likes her a lot. He wants this to be real — whatever it is or isn’t, however long it lasts. He wants to be able to look back on it and see — a story about him.

“Yeah, um —” He starts to shift up and she rolls off him, so that they’re both sitting cross-legged on her bed, casual and comfortable. “Do you remember — a while ago, you asked me — you asked what I was into, uh — in bed,” he says, fumbling with the words, and she nods, brows knit over watchful eyes. “And I said — I said not much, basically, or — nothing in particular, and that — that wasn’t exactly, uh… true. And I know,” he rushes to add as her pretty mouth makes a disappointed line, “I know I should have — just answered the question, or — or at least said, like, I didn’t want to talk about it, or I wasn’t ready, or whatever, instead of — pretending there was nothing to say. Like, that would have been the — mature, adult thing to do, and I — didn’t do it. So I’m — I’m sorry about that. It — I kinda freaked, a little, or — whatever, that’s not — I’m sorry.”

Serena takes a deep breath. He thinks he sees her shoulders ease, or he sees her decide to ease her shoulders. “I appreciate that.”

“And I mean — the part where I said I liked what we were doing,” he says, “that was real. And it’s — still true. Like if we — if we didn’t change anything, that would be — great.”

“But where’s the fun in that?” she drawls.

She reaches for his hand. Quentin takes it, grateful. “So — so do you still want to know?”

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I still want to know.”

“Okay.” His heart is racing suddenly, face hot like before a middle school class presentation. “I — I’m into, like — or, I like, uh —” He keeps tripping over it, the words and the idea, the messiness of it. “Sorry. I’m not — I’m not great at this.”

Serena lies down on her side, gesturing for him to follow, and he does, facing her. Cozy and close. “So my first serious boyfriend was really into wearing my underwear. Well —” She rolls her eyes a little. “He was really into wearing women’s underwear I had previously worn. My actual underwear didn’t really do it for him. I wound up buying a bunch of lacy pink garbage.” Quentin smiles, thinking of her plain black cotton. “That relationship was kind of a trainwreck in ways I should’ve seen coming — he was like, seven years older than me, and I was too young to know that that’s fine if you’re in your late twenties but a red flag if you’re nineteen — but the sex was great, which was probably why it lasted as long as it did. And like — I’m personally pretty boring, left to my own devices. Like, I haven’t fucked a guy wearing women’s underwear since, and I don’t miss it, you know? But I loved fucking him in that stupid Victoria’s Secret bullshit, because — he got so into it, man, and _that_ was fucking hot for me. So —” She shrugs. “I don’t know. I thought it might help, if I kind of — expanded on why I asked. I’m not just being polite, and there’s also not any secret way to be _right_ , here. You know, if the answer had really been — nah, I’m good — that would be like, okay, cool, continue as you were.”

“Thanks,” he says, meaning it. “I — I’ve never really, like — talked about it, I guess. It was something that just kind of — happened, with this guy I dated. Just sort of — evolved, or whatever.” The Eliot thing, as true in sex as it had always been with everything else — the way he could open Quentin up almost without trying, the way being with him set something in Quentin loose enough that things just spilled out of him. He’d thought sometimes how lucky he’d been, to wind up with the one person who had that effect on him. He was lucky, to have had that. But it’s over now, and Quentin’s still here. Quentin’s planning to stick around.

So he breathes into the knot in his stomach and trying to steady his trembling hands, he — starts. “I like — I don’t know, I guess you could say some — some things that are kind of rough, ish. Not like — I mean, I don’t own a pair of nipple clamps, or anything like that. But, like — teeth, pulling my hair, kind of like — that level. Uh.” God, the words are so terrible. Flushing he says, rushed, “Like, spanking, I guess, although” — he rolls his eyes — “I fucking hate that word.”

“Really?” she asks, smiling. “Why?”

“ _Because_ ,” he says, “spanking is like — what parents do to their kids if they don’t know how to actually talk to them about acting up, like the word has all these spare the rod spoil the child connotations, and that makes it, like, weird. I mean I shouldn’t judge, I have my own — weird psychosexual shit going on — and I won’t even say that’s not, like, related, although mostly it just — feels good, I guess, but — like I don’t want to feel like I’m someone’s _child_ , that’s not — anyway.”

“So you like — having your ass smacked, with an open palm,” she suggests, brow playfully arched, and he manages a laugh. “What about that weird psychosexual shit? Unless you don’t wanna go there right now.”

“I —” He does and he doesn’t; he wants to do it, he doesn’t want to want it, he wants to tell her, he doesn’t want her to know. “I like, uh, being held down, I guess. That’s kind of — in between. Or — tied up, that’s — that’s good too.”

“What what?” she asks, curious.

He shrugs. That’s an easy question, at least. “It doesn’t really matter. I’m not one of those, like — like I don’t care about the _aesthetics_ of it, or whatever, that doesn’t really do anything for me. I just like the — the feeling of it. Uh.” His ears are burning. “I like it — when the other person makes, like, rules or whatever.”

She chews her bottom lip. “What kind of rules?”

“Honestly like — I sort of feel like the actual content doesn’t matter?” he says. “I don’t — really know what that says. I guess — things like not talking, not — doing certain things until I’m allowed. Or until I — do something else, I mean — I guess I like, I don’t know, getting instructions. Or being told to — do things.” Understatement of the year, probably, but like — he’s trying, okay.

“Like — nicely?” she says. “Or not so nicely?”

Yeah, that’s the fucking question, isn’t it. “Both?” Quentin swallows; swallows again; breathes in and out. “I — I don’t know, I — get into it, I guess, when someone is — kind of mean about it. Or just about — about me, like — like if they act like there’s something kind of wrong with me, for — the stuff I like. Like if they tell me I’m —” He sighs, irritated at how stupid it sounds out of context. “You know, like, _oh, you’re dirty_ , that kind of thing. But —” Quentin feels like he is going to die of embarrassment, but he actually knows what dying is, and it’s not this, so — “But then also, like, the opposite, too. Like —” He actually laughs then, at how fucking transparent it is when he puts it into words. “I mean, Jesus, I guess it’s like, what I want is for someone to tell me how ashamed I should be about how fucked up this all is, and then tell me that actually it’s okay. Which is, like, not — I don’t know, that feels like a lot to ask.” He tries for a rueful smile. “I’ve been told I might be kind of high-maintenance.”

She shrugs. “There are worse things to be, right? I’m not complaining.”

“Yeah,” he says.

Serena tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, studying his face. “Do you really think it’s fucked up, though?”

He takes a deep breath, considering the question. “I must, right?” he says. “On some level? Or else I wouldn’t — be into that part of it. Or, shit — maybe I wouldn’t be into any of it, if — if I didn’t know how fucked up I was.”

Gently she says, “Everyone’s fucked up.”

Quentin can’t keep from barking half-bitter laugh. “Yeah, uh. Not everyone fucks themselves up right into the psych ward.” He tenses, wondering if he’s ruined it now.

Serena takes this in, looking at him; gives him a small smile. “No wonder you overidentified with Ivan.”

He nods, throat tight. It’s — a kind way to respond. Sweet and sincere and not too heavy. The whole excruciating conversation feels worth it, to have arrived here. Whatever happens with them, he’ll carry this moment always. “Yeah.” Then he shakes his head. “Sorry. That wasn’t very sexy of me.”

“That really does it for some people, actually,” she says. “I sort of outgrew that, so. Good thing I already think you’re hot.”

He laughs, squeezing her hand. I’m lucky, he thinks. I’m so fucked up and so lucky.

“Did you want to talk about — that?” she asks.

“No,” he says. It surprises him, how easily the answer comes. “I mean — you can ask me about it, if you want. And I understand if I’ve, like, killed the mood. But if you’re asking what I want, like — I kind of don’t really want to talk anymore, at all.”

“I can work with that,” she says. “Hey — sit up, okay?”

He does, back against her headboard with his legs out in front of him, and she crawls into his lap, settles with her body close against his. He looks up at her face, halfway smirking down at him. Her big eyes. “So you’re —”

“Ssh,” she says, pressing a finger gently to his lips, a touch that sends a flutter down the back of his neck with surprise. “I’m busy. Don’t interrupt.”

She catches his eye for a second like she’s giving him a chance to steer her in another direction, and Quentin gives a slight nod because — yeah, he can roll with this. A smile flickers onto her face and she starts kissing him, deep and slow, long enough that the tension from fucking like unburdening himself of all his weird sexual shit seeps out of his shoulders, his chest, his stomach. He brings his hands to her sides, holding there at the top of her hips, feeling loose and warm and content to be where he is. Content to be who he is, if that means he gets to do this.

She breaks the kiss to mouth at his jaw, a familiar move by now and welcome, but this time when she gets to his ear she nips at it gently once, twice; hesitates; then takes the lobe between her teeth, pulling slightly, eliciting from him a startled gasp. She lingers there, experimenting with the pressure, moving her teeth up and down the shell of his ear while he feels himself stiffening up and melting into her touch simultaneously, breathing a little harder with every moment he expects her to stop and she doesn’t.

By the time she finally pulls away it’s all he can do for a minute to stare at her open-mouthed. “Did you fucking like that?” she asks, enough of a sneer to make his pulse stutter but there’s doubt in her eyes, like it’s a real question too.

Quentin nods slowly, meeting her gaze.

Serena nods back, briefly, and then seems to sort of make up her mind. She reaches a hand to the back of his neck and grabs roughly a fistful of his hair — “Oh _fuck_ ,” he breathes — and leans in to whisper in his ear, hot, “I didn’t fucking hear you.”

Shit, shit, shit — “I did,” he says, eyes fluttering briefly shut. “I liked that.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” she says. “Someone like you — so fucking dirty.”

His cock jumps at the magic goddamn words. “I am,” he says, radiating with it, “I am, I’m so — dirty, so —” The words in his mouth, hot and embarrassing, and he _wants_ — “filthy, it’s —”

“You’re filthy,” she says, catching on, making her voice harder, tugging his hair so that his head’s at an uncomfortable angle which is — so _hot_ the shock of it runs all the way down his middle — “so filthy, it’s fucked up —” She lets go of him, roughly, and climbs off him. His body feels cool where warmth was and he’s so in the moment he feels almost disoriented. “Take off your fucking clothes.”

Quentin rushes to undress. It’s funny because — he can see her kind of wavering in and out of the performance, trying to come up with the right lines, her hesitation peeking through the persona she’s constructing on the fly, but that doesn’t make it any less hot. It’s exciting, to feel like neither of them know exactly what they’re doing, a frisson of uncertainty that adds an intoxicating nervous energy to the proceedings. By the time he lies back down, naked, exposed, he feels like every inch of skin is alert.

Serena’s still fully dressed. That’s — hotter than he would have expected. “Okay. My turn.” She jerks her chin to add, “Hand on your cock while you watch, but — don’t move it.”

Quentin — obeys, god, it feels so good to _obey_ , that’s so fucked up of him, shame flooding his chest while his warm dick twitches in his grip. Serena strips for him, not particularly showy in her movements but slow enough that it’s a struggle (a good struggle, a fucking hot struggle) keeping still as she reveals her body, her broad shoulders and her breasts and the elegant curve of her waist, the light dusting of freckles along her collarbone. She stands there for a moment when she’s done, eyes on his cock like she’s checking to make sure — _fuck_ — he’s being good, before coming back to bed and positioning herself on top of him.

“Is this what you wanted?” she says, and it’s like it was before, part of the game and wanting to know.

“Yeah,” he says, voice rough. “It’s — so good, Serena, fuck —” He’s so turned on he can barely talk — turned on by the way she moved and the implicit promise in all of it, the possibility of more, of things he doesn’t even know. He feels like if she touches him he’s going to explode.

She bites into his neck and he groans out loud, hips moving of their own accord while she works at the delicate skin there with her teeth, sucking at him, right on that line between pleasure and pain. The line that says _good_ , the line that says _almost_ and _too much_ , the line that says _yes_ and _fucked up_ and _please, please, please_. He’s so hard it aches and she’s keeping her hips hovering above him, leaving him with the knife of his desire. She moves her hands across his shoulders, digging the nails in a little in a way that makes his back arch, scratching halfway down his arms and then stopping, unsure.

Trying to read her and selfishly hoping he’s right he brings his hands up to rest above his head on the mattress and she follows them with hers, intertwining her fingers in his. She lifts her face from his neck then — god, she’s fucking beautiful — and says, in her own voice this time, “Like this?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, grateful to be here, under her like this. “Or — I mean if you’re okay with it, my wrists are —”

She adjusts her hands, looping thumb and fingers around his wrists. “There?”

His breath stops, a moment, at the contact, that sense of rightness. “Uh huh,” he says. “Right there.”

“Okay,” she says. “Sorry to like — break character. I’ve just — I haven’t done this kind of thing, before, so I don’t really know how —”

He manages to smile up at her. “It’s not — like I’m not some expert on, on _kink_ , or whatever,” he says, rolling his eyes. Literally all the sex words are the worst words. “I don’t have like, a checklist in my head, or — I don’t know. I mean you can ask me — I don’t mind that. But just — whatever you’re worried about, don’t worry about it.”

She studies him, thoughtful. In this context somehow even that is hot. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, honestly,” he says, “I’m really just — a very normal person, who’s kind of weird in bed.” It doesn’t feel terrible, to say it like this. “And this is all — like it’s good, it’s really fucking good.”

“Okay,” she says, evidently reassured. “So then — how tight do you want me here?”

Quentin takes a moment to answer, distracted by the invitation in the question, the imagined pressure already fogging up his brain. “Whatever’s, like — don’t do anything that makes you feel weird,” he says. “But, uh — you pretty definitely don’t have to worry about going too hard, if that — clarifies things.”

She nods at him. “I think so.”

She presses down on him and fuck, _fuck_ , he likes this so much, he’s wanted it so badly — her on top of him controlling where he stays, her hands strong and steady against his own eternally skittish body, releasing every unknown tension and letting in a wave of pleasure that could almost knock him out. He could stay like this for ages. But she’s watching him, watching his face go slack and his breath turn shallow, and as she takes in what’s happening with a hunger that’s sharpening on her face she presses down more, harder, sending his hips bucking upwards, wordless groans he’s too far gone to be embarrassed about loud from his throat — and then Jesus fuck tighter _still_ , really pinning him down now, shifting forward to put her bodyweight into it.

“You really fucking like this,” she hisses. “You goddamn freak.”

The word hits him like an erotic two-by-four. The world doesn’t exist beyond this room, beyond them, beyond his body and her body and the game they’re playing together, the one where they make up the rules as they go. “Fuck,” he pants, hardly noticing he’s saying it, “fuck, fuck —”

She lowers her hips down then, finally, and immediately he starts rutting against her, desperate and undignified in all directions while her hips roll back against him, feeling the slick warmth of her cunt and leaking precome along her belly and her bush as his body insists on what it needs. He’s out of his mind, he’s so in the moment, he feels so fucking _good_ , wild and free while he’s safe under her grip and her watchful face, loving the smell of her sweat and her breasts against his skin ahd her hands keeping him stubbornly in place.

“I —” he starts, loses the thread immediately as she bites his neck again, where it’s still tender from before. “This is — so fucking good,” he manages, “but uh — if we wanna have sex, we need to either hurry up or change things up, because — sorry to be really unsexy, but I’m not gonna last a lot longer here.”

She looks at him, questioning, eyes dark, lips red with use. “Really?”

He gives a breathless laugh. “Like, really really.”

She doesn’t move, though; she keeps studying him with that funny expression, curious and flushed. “What if I want that?”

“If you — oh,” he says, surprised; his abdomen tightens with the image of it. “I mean — yeah? Yes? I’m not — not opposed.”

“Okay,” she breathes low. “Okay.” She pushes her hips harder against him, giving him more resistance to thrust up against, lowers again to bite at his ear this time. His whole body is awash in arousal, head thrillingly clouded with it. This is so good, it’s so fucking good —

“I’m giving this to you,” she whispers into his ear, a little awkward as she tries to find the phrasing, “because — because you did everything I said. Right?”

He shudders. “I did. I do, I always will —”

“Yeah,” she says, more confident now, “that’s fucking right, you will —”

“I will,” he says, drenched in his hunger and his shame, “always, because I’m good —”

“So good,” she says, shifting her voice now to be sweet, steady, _fuck_ — “You’re so good, Quentin. You’re so good at this.”

“I —” He almost moves his wrists, but stops. “I’m gonna — don’t move your hands, okay? I just want to — feel it —”

“Okay,” she says, and she stays gripping him tight while he tries to twist his wrists in her grasp, body flooding with the reverberation of her resistance, the way she doesn’t let up even when he pushes up the way he would if he were trying to get out, and he’s dragging his cock along her center rough and irregular, and the whole time she’s whispering in his ear — “It’s okay. It’s good. Whatever you want, it’s good here. Whatever you want.” — and he comes against her loud and mindless in a bodily thrill.

When he comes to his senses a minute later she’s staring down at him with a kind of wonder, almost, her hands loose now at his arms. “Jesus,” he says, and sits up to kiss her hard, feeling — cleaned out, exhausted, overfuckingjoyed. Like this whole time, this whole time since coming back to life or even longer, there had been some part of his body missing and he didn’t even know, and now suddenly it’s returned to him and he’s been put back to rights. “Okay,” he says when he feels ready to do something that requires a little thinking, “what do you want? Can I — anything, god —”

She laughs. “I told you, I’m basic. You wanna go down on me?”

“Always,” he says, and he’s down there so fast she laughs, tilting happily onto her back while he gets happily to work, licking at her clit the way she likes, careful to give space to the spot where it gets too sensitive, enjoying the wetness there and the way her thighs start twitching while heat builds in her body, the way her back arches when he slips two fingers inside and finds the place that makes her cry out. She slides a hand into his hair, gentle now, scritching affectionately at his scalp, and that feels good, too, sweet and relaxing.

“That was so hot,” she murmurs, starting to rock her pelvis against his face, “so fucking hot,” and he groans his agreement against her pussy, trying to follow her cues until she’s gripping his hair and squeezing her legs against his head and he’s feeling her tighten against his fingers inside her, holding in place until the aftershocks of her orgasm are done.

In the dark, later, when they’ve cleaned up and she’s put on a pair of soft striped pajamas because she gets chilly at night this time of year, he says against the back of her neck, “Thank you.”

She turns just far enough to be able to see him. “For the sex?”

“No. Well, yes, but —” He doesn’t know how to put it into words. It’s too big. They’ve known each other four months. And it’s not really about her, exactly, even though he really likes her, and even though it is kind of about how lucky he was to meet her when he did. “For — listening, I guess.”

“Of course,” she says softly.

He kisses the nape of her neck to punctuate the end of the conversation. She nestles up against him to sleep and he curls around her, sleepy and warm and happy, so happy he’s stuck around long enough to learn he can still feel like this.

*

In the morning they go to the bistro by her apartment for a late breakfast before she kisses him goodbye to head off to meet a friend and he takes the bus home, listening to _Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots_ , one of his forever favorites, desert island top five for sure, and thinking. Thinking about sex and all the things he’s used it for, and how nothing about last night felt like any of those sorry half-remembered escapes. Thinking about how he could have wrecked himself, again, again, and then he’d never have had that, but he didn’t. Thinking about everything he still believes about himself, every shitty thing he’s done and every ugly piece he hates, and how maybe none of that will ever go away but maybe still there are other stories he can learn to tell.

It’s Saturday, so when he gets home he changes and goes for a run — six miles, slow and steady, enjoying the cool December breeze. The first mile sucks, the way the first mile always sucks, and then it gets easier, and at a certain point it starts to feel good, every step a reminder that he has a body, every step a reminder that that’s a lucky thing. He remembers — July last year, trying to save his own life and more terrified than he’d ever let on to anyone that he wouldn’t be able to manage it, deciding to walk the six miles to the meeting in University City and giving up before he got halfway there. Now he runs that far, and it just means it’s Saturday. After he stretches back at the house he takes a long shower, refreshing and hot, relaxing his worn muscles. Once he’s dressed he watches his reflection reappear above the bathroom sink as the steam clears. He’s lived in California for more than a year and he hasn’t worn sunscreen once in that time but every time he catches himself in a mirror, he’s surprised he’s not paler, still.

He’s hungry; maybe he’ll cook something. A stir-fry, maybe; there’s a recipe he was playing around with before he let himself fall apart. He should call Julia, soon. Maybe he’ll do that, and then maybe he’ll see if Luisa will let him buy her dinner at the Indian place she likes. It’s the solstice in a few days; they’re celebrating tonight. Serena wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it, but she’ll let him know. He’s been too out of it to ask anyone else, but maybe he’ll shoot a couple texts to the East Coast later. Maybe he’ll do some reading in the times between. He holds _maybe_ like the magic for a spell, something you make and something you reach for, something given and something his. Something that’s everywhere, but still feels like a miracle, when he lets himself remember. There are too many things it’s easy for him to forget. He forgot that he liked his life again, again, until he remembered that he wanted to live. He wants to learn how. He did remember.

He makes enough stir-fry for the house and tuning into the magic to adjust the spice ratios he thinks, maybe he doesn’t know how to live, but he knows how to do this: how to forget, how to remember. He knows how to fuck up and how to try. How to give up and how to start over. Over, and over, and over. That’s not much. But maybe it’s not nothing, either. Maybe that’s what living is — these stops and starts, these lessons cycled through again and again. The barren soil, the flowering garden. Maybe he knows more than he thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warning:** This chapter gets kind of a blanket warning for suicidal ideation. As always, feel free to reach out on Tumblr for more details.


	10. Chapter 10

“Ten — nine — eight — seven — six — five — four — three — two — one —”

A cheer ripples through the penthouse. Quentin can feel the edges of funny little spells rolling through in celebration, hearing the pops and whistles of spell-crafted sparklers and someone’s laughing deep-voiced _Oh, shit_ as magic collides unexpectedly with itself and swirls into a tangle. He doesn’t see any of it, though; he’s too busy kissing Serena. Kissing someone at midnight is something he’s always thought was tacky and embarrassing and the domain of dumb people who let Hallmark cards and Hugh Grant movies dictate the terrain of their interior lives, but honestly, he probably would have been better off imprinting on those than letting his self-loathing shape his entire existence. God knows he’s not about to start living according to the gospel of _Love Actually_ , but he’s been experimenting with the hypothesis that he knows more than he thinks he does about the things he’s been so sure he can’t do, and way, way less about the shit that’s always felt obvious and true. Like, maybe his expertise in the field of Reasons Quentin Coldwater Sucks And Coincidentally Life Is Objectively A Desolate March Towards Death Through A Bitter Wasteland Of Discarded Dreams And Tooth-Grinding Monotony is not actually valid. Maybe he’s kind of an idiot, and maybe there are times that’s pretty good news.

Anyway kissing is always nice, so, like. Trying new things, one, his kneejerk assumptions about himself and reality, zero.

They break apart, drunk and giggling, and Quentin catches Julia’s eye, grinning at him, which is kind of embarrassing, but also sweet. She ambles over and starts to say, “So, are you —”

But then Josh approaches bearing a tray of Jell-O shots, Margo right behind him tipsily imperious, calling “Drink up, bitches, your High King demands it,” and they get distracted because, like, if the High King _demands_ , who are they to say no?

An hour later Kady tuts for an airhorn spell and a temporary silencing charm to get everyone’s attention. “Alright, the Baba Yaga set a curfew. Apparently a friend of hers is staying in the apartment below us and she's impervious to silencing wards, so. Party’s over here.” People groan noiselessly. It’s kind of funny to watch.

“But,” Penny says, swaying a little as he loops an arm around Quentin’s shoulders, “if you’re not done for the night —”

“California’s just getting started, so hitch a fucking ride,” Quentin yells, leaning against his shoulder. He points at his shirt, helpfully expository: “West Coast, best coast, bitches!”

They arrive at the house on the bay to amiable whoops and scattered applause and someone welcoming them with another round of shots. After that things get fuzzy. When Quentin wakes up the next morning, draped over Serena in his bed and hungover as hell but not that bothered by it because, whatever, it’s New Year’s Day, even the banks are closed, he remembers the latter portion of the evening mostly as a happy, buzzing blur, punctuated by a few snapshot recollections —

— doubled-over laughing, saying when he could get the words out “Why weren’t we ever friends?” and Penny, laughing just as hard, said “Because I was a fucking asshole and you were fucking annoying,” and it was just, like, the _funniest_ thing anyone had ever said —

— hand on Rishi’s shoulder, talking to he doesn’t remember who, telling them very earnestly “This guy. This guy is the best guy. He’s the best one, of the guys. No but like — like the _best_ —”

— kissing Serena again at California midnight, sloppier this time but still good, drunk enough by then to admit that maybe he didn’t so much mind the part where anyone could see, maybe he enjoyed a little the idea of having witnesses, like, _yeah, that’s right, I did that, me_ —

— “No but it’s like,” said Josh, words a little slurred and eyes intent, “on the level of filmmaking, absolutely, Lucas’s ambitions outstripped him, but if you ignore Jar Jar Binks there’s an interesting story there about, like, the vulnerabilities of democracy —” and Quentin threw his arms wide and said “ _Dude_ , I’ve been saying this for fucking _years_ ,” and Margo said “Mother Mary and Oprah above help me, God made two of them,” but she was smiling —

— “Serena’s great,” Eliot said, smiling like he was happy for Quentin and maybe sort of proud, and Quentin wrapped his arms around him and pressed his face against Eliot’s chest saying “I’m so glad you think so. I’m _so_ glad, El. El thank you. El, I’m so, so glad —”

— and Julia, finding him again to finish the question she’d started to ask earlier, was he making any resolutions, and Quentin grinned because he had _such_ a great resolution this year. “My relisution — resezation — resurrection — that word is _hard_ ,” he said. “Whatever — my thing is — I’m gonna have the best year ever. Better than — than all the other years. Ever. In my life.”

Julia raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Lofty goal.”

And Quentin laughed, bubbling over, because, like — “It’s really not,” he said, “I mean, have you seen the competition?”

*

So things are going well. Incredibly well, actually, but Quentin still feels — it’s almost a superstition, this fear that if he looks head-on at how good things are, that will trigger some bear trap in his brain to fuck them up by force. Like if he lets it all in, sinks for too long into the frankly miraculous reality that he wakes up most days basically glad to be here on this Earth living the life he’s built for himself, into how fucking amazing that feels after a lifetime of the opposite, he won’t be able to hold onto all of it, and it’ll slip like water from his grasp.

Honestly, he’s not sure that’s an irrational fear; it seems like maybe the exact kind of self-sabotaging bullshit his brain would pull. In college when things got bad sometimes he used to stay up late procrastinating on the papers he couldn’t focus on by miserably reading self-help articles as a weird exercise in tormenting himself by looking at the kind of shit normal people thought qualified as problems, and sometimes one of the perky white-toothed advice gurus would say something about tackling your fear of success, or whatever, and Quentin thought that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard because, like, what kind of idiot was afraid of success? He would have sold a fucking kidney for it. But now he thinks the advice gurus may have had a point, because even if he thinks he wants to be better, to be happy, even if that’s true — it must be scary, if his brain has fought him so hard on it. Maybe it’s always scary, to like. Change, or whatever.

And he’s still, like, him. He still has days he doesn’t want to do fucking anything because all of it seems pointless, nights he can’t fall asleep because he’s looping the highlights reel of his fuck-ups. He still feels tidal waves of bewilderment that the people he’s conned into friendship have stuck around this long, and stabs of fear that Serena is going to figure out his deal and bail, just like anyone that might follow her. Sometimes he still feels like shit and the way he names it in his head is _I want to fucking die_. But he doesn’t, actually, and he’s not going to, and that part — that part he knows, all the way inside him. So all the other shit — it feels survivable now, because he knows he’s going to survive it. Which is sort of tautological, but — he’s spent a long time mentally outlining the logic of his own inevitable ruin. He doesn’t mind swapping that out for a little fucking faith, for once.

He reads esoteric theory on transmutational naturalism and interdimensional castings hoping to stumble on something that will unlock the cultivation spell in Fillory; he burns himself getting overly ambitious with a quiche in the kitchen and has to throw the whole thing out and start over. He lies in bed remembering with a flush of shame as fresh as the first time that he killed himself because he wanted to be a hero and he thinks _I want to fucking die_ and he thinks _yeah, but you’re not going to, so now what_ , and then he gets out of bed and finds a stupid yoga video on YouTube to take him out of his head until he can try to fall asleep. He comes in Serena’s mouth with his wrists bound together above his head with her plain black underwear and later when she’s drifting off in his arms he realizes that it’s easier to ease the fear of being found out when he’s not actually hiding who he is. He hops along on one of Rishi’s Sunday outings to the house in La Jolla to marvel at the way the ghosts have diminished into these funny unfrightening flickers, little bits of energy sparking and stuttering, because Rishi’s been coming out every week for months, nudging them out of the grooves they’d been stuck in for decades, bit by patient bit. 

Quentin goes for a run listening to Yo La Tengo and remembers when he started running, how quickly he tired out, how much his body hurt the next day, because he’d done this thing he’d never done before. How many tries it took to stick. The fucking process, long and hard and exhausting and terrifying and — this is the crazy part, the part he feels like he realizes anew a dozen times a week and each time it’s a total shock — worth it, actually. And maybe it’s been more of a process for him than for most people, and maybe it always will be, but maybe that doesn’t have to matter as much as he’s convinced himself it does. Maybe he was wrong about that too, and the only thing that matters is that he’s doing it, every day.

*

“I’m gonna do a quick grocery run,” Luisa announces, “anyone want to add anything to the list before I head out?”

Quentin looks up from a nearly impenetrable essay about considerations in circumstantial transplantation across realms. “I’m good. You?”

Rishi blinks, pulls his screen half-closed. The two of them have fallen into an informal routine, bringing their laptops and materials down to the dining table to research or write side by side. Mostly they don’t talk, but sometimes one of them will ask if the other is familiar with a particular reference, or pass on something that seems like it might lead down a path relevant to the other’s field. It’s nice. Really nice, actually. It makes Quentin feel secretly very grown-up, somehow, which is dweeby of him, but — whatever. It’s nice. “Is green tea on the list?”

Luisa checks her phone. “It is now.”

“Oh hey,” says Quentin, “you want to take the compass with you?” They have another spellshare coming up, and they’ve been trying to reach out to people they don’t already know. Quentin’s already taught her the activation spell for days she’s out and about, in case she comes across anyone who might fall into its net; his mended version, fortunately, didn’t import the original compass’s specificity to the original user.

“Oh, good idea,” she says, and Quentin takes it out of his pocket, where he’s made a habit of carrying it, and hands it over.

As the door shuts on her exit, Rishi asks, “What’s the deal with that thing?”

“The compass?” Quentin gives him a quick recap of its origins and use.

“Huh. Cool,” Rishi says, looking interested.

“Yeah, it’s neat,” says Quentin. “It’s good because — I mean, it’s definitely flagged people no one here had ever run into, so that helps in terms of like, expanding the net. A couple people at the last spellshare, they didn’t even know there were others out there who could do what they do, or that they could learn more. Sort of sucks that we only have one, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Have you tried making more?” says Rishi.

Quentin shrugs. “It’s a black-star spell to create it, and they don’t exactly love to share. Plus, I mean, the original is made of bone, I’m pretty sure, and — there are less weird ways to get that, but that crew’s not exactly known for their ethics, so. There might be a way to reverse engineer it, but I don’t know where I’d start with that.”

“Yeah, but I meant like, with your spell,” says Rishi. “The cultivation spell, like — do you still have the original?”

“I — yeah, I do,” Quentin says; it’s somewhere in the mess of his desk drawer. He stares at Rishi, comprehension dawning in his brain. “You’re saying if I broke off another piece, and ran it again — but there’s like, broken objects have this, this essence of the missing wholeness, I don’t know if — if that got transferred over to the new one, during the spell, the old version might just be — inert, now, like — I don’t know if it would work.”

Rishi is giving him a look like Quentin’s being fucking stupid but he’s too nice to say so. “So… try?”

Which — so, yeah, Quentin was being fucking stupid. “Well,” he says, “when you put it _that_ way.” He starts getting excited, thinking of another question to put to the magic he’s designed, starting to think already of all the things he hasn’t bothered to find out. “I mean when you put it that way, like — it might work for some things and not others — duplication but also the spell in general — like, there are so many ways it might play out for different kinds of objects, magic or not magic, using materials with magical properties but not inherently charmed — and I haven’t even thought about, like, I have a set of conditions it works under, but I don’t know what happens if I make certain substitutions, if it could still work but differently — or, like, it changes the object in the mending but I don’t know how much the caster can influence that, like the new compass isn’t user-locked the way the old one was but I don’t know if I did that subconsciously because when I planted it I was thinking a lot about access shit or if it happened as a matter of course, but there’s got to be a way to test that, right, if I do like, maybe the same thing but try to shift my internal circumstances across casting — shit, dude, you’re a genius.”

“I know,” Rishi says drily. “That’s why they pay me a taxable stipend that amounts to thirty whole percent of a living wage." He shakes his head. “Fucking academia, man.”

“I know,” says Quentin, but he’s not really thinking about the labor exploitation of graduate students. He’s thinking about the garden bed by the house, bare these many months, and what he might put into it, and what might come out. He’s thinking about the future — the future he has, the future he’s making, the future he’s glad to be around to see.

*

They host a spellshare on the second weekend in January when a wind blows in warm even by the standards of winter in San Diego; under the midday sun it feels more like spring, hot and bright. The weather is gorgeous enough and enough people show up that they opt to move proceedings out to the beach, kicking things off with the buzz of communally cast wards to guard against sight before launching into an exploration of water spells. Luisa’s obviously in her element, which makes Quentin smile to watch as she conjures whirlpools and eddies in the surf or in the air; Kady’s there, along with Penny and Julia, and she dazzles the crowd with spell that sends a wave crashing aggressively onto a target. Quentin joins Luisa to try and start the learning process, at least, for the hand-filling spell, the two of them and Jenny from book club learning to adjust their casting so their magic plays nicely together, weaving into a glowing strand the others can latch onto instead of clashing unhelpfully. Serena manages a few drops and gets so excited she drops them immediately on the sand; Julia fills her hands and splashes Penny with it, laughing at his mock outrage. One of the newcomers, a woman in her forties who didn’t know there was a name for what she was until Quentin ran into her walking through town, keys into it and cries a little at the joy of it, and Quentin feels his heart filling, getting to be a part of that.

Afterwards some people peel out, while others stay to lay out towels and enjoy the heat. Quentin sits in a cluster with his friends from New York and his friends from here, looking out at the bay sparkling in the sun and feeling contentedly at home.

“That hedge spell the guy with the tattoos did,” Julia says, “the boiling spell — I’d done that before, but it was so much faster, today.”

“Water spells, in my experience, tend to be really sensitive to geological circumstances,” says Luisa. “They’re more powerful near bodies of water, especially along the coasts. Aquamancy is my discipline, and I’ve actually noticed that if I’m far enough from natural water — we’re talking, like, Colorado, not a trip to Vegas — my magic in general gets weaker.”

“Is that why you couldn’t move to Wyoming?” Quentin asks, smiling.

Luisa rolls her eyes, like he knew she would. “That’s not even in the top ten reasons I couldn’t move to Wyoming.”

“That’s so interesting,” says Julia. “So your magic varies geologically?”

“Yeah,” says Luisa. “Actually, it’s funny — so I grew up near Fresno, right? And I come from adepts on both sides, but when I was little apparently I was sort of a late bloomer, compared to what my parents were used to in their families, because they thought maybe the gift had skipped a generation until we did a beach trip when I was seven and they found me making waves in the sandcastle I’d built.”

“Seven doesn’t seem like a late bloomer to me,” Rishi says. “I was in high school the first time I lit a match by accident.”

“Yeah,” says Kady, brows furrowed, “my mom was a hedge, and I think I was at least ten before I could do anything.”

Luisa purses her lips. “But like — are you _sure_ , though? Because — people look for what they recognize, right? Think about all the times, don’t lie, you’ve done magic somewhere you shouldn’t have, without bothering to throw up a ward first.” Everyone exchanges a matching set of sheepish looks. “And it’s fine, right? Not because we’re all so amazingly sneaky —”

“Speak for yourself,” Rishi says, “I’m sneaky as hell.”

“— but _because_ ,” Luisa goes on, flicking Rishi’s ankle without missing a beat, “even if someone who shouldn’t _does_ see us heat up our coffee, or adjust our hair, or whatever, they’re not going to think, _holy shit, that person just did fucking magic!_ They’re going to think they must have seen something wrong before, or we’re just doing something weird with our hands. Or they’ll think nothing, because they won’t even notice, because they’re not looking for it. It’s not part of their world.”

“So you’re saying if someone doesn’t grow up with magic,” Julia says, “they might do it, as a kid, but they won’t know they’re doing it?”

“All kids believe in magic,” says Luisa. “Then they outgrow it. And if you don’t know it’s real, you look back and you think, _oh, remember that time we convinced ourselves we could change the color of rocks_ , or whatever, and your memory overwrites the fact that one time, you actually did, because it doesn’t have any place to put something that doesn’t match what it already knows.”

“Or you think there’s something wrong with you,” says Penny. “You think you’re crazy, you’re hearing voices.”

“Exactly,” says Luisa.

“What about me, though?” says Kady. “I knew magic was real. My mom did it all the time.”

“I mean, I’m sure there is some natural variation in when people come into their first magic,” Luisa says. “But also —” She shrugs. “People are really, really bad at adjusting their expectations from what they’re used to. If your mom was in the black star crowd, or somewhere else steeped in the whole magic-comes-from-pain mentality, maybe you did it right in front of her and she didn’t even notice, because it didn’t show up the way she was expecting. Like — the time you think of as your first, were you upset?”

“Damn — I was,” Kady says. “She said I couldn’t go on a field trip and we got into a screaming match about it — next thing I know her cheek is bleeding like crazy and she’s telling me how proud she is and I’m freaking out because I have no idea what the fuck is happening.”

“Jesus,” says Quentin. He’s never really learned much about Kady’s life before Brakebills.

“That’s a lot of power for a first spell,” Luisa says. “I’d bet there’s something further back than that.”

“My fifth-grade science project,” Serena says, and laughs. “Fuck, now I feel like I cheated — I got a blue ribbon for my black-eyed peas, but there’s no way they should have grown as fast as they did.”

“Now that you mention it,” says Kady, “there was totally some bullshit diorama about like the Puritans that, like — I was not fucking crafty enough to make something that good.” She smiles. “They were offering Haagen-Dazs gift certificates to the best one, and I _really_ wanted to win.”

“Ms. Weissman,” says Julia. “Shit, Q, do you remember —”

“Oh my god,” Quentin says, straightening up with the memory. “That was — you, wasn’t it?”

“Jesus,” says Julia, covering her mouth. “I’d almost feel bad, except — fuck her, she deserved it —”

“Does someone care to illuminate those of us outside of the mindmeld?” says Penny.

“Our music teacher in elementary school,” says Quentin. “She was one of those weird people who somehow wound up teaching even though she clearly, like, hated children.”

“She was like a failed Broadway singer or something,” says Julia. “Got into teaching to pay the bills, stayed with it after the dream died, took out her bitterness on generations of nine-year-olds.”

“It’s funny,” Quentin says, “because I was usually a total teacher’s pet even in subjects I didn’t like —”

“Shocker,” says Penny.

“— but I always fucking hated music class,” he continues, giving Penny the finger without bothering to look, “because I’m like functionally tone-deaf and hated doing anything where people were looking at me, and that’s before getting into having the worst teacher ever. And then in fourth grade we learned the recorder, which —”

“We all sucked at,” says Julia, “because we all hated her so nobody cared. It made her _so mad_.” Julia says. She mimics Ms. Weissman’s harsh tones: “Children! Children! You must _practice!_ Life is not Santa Claus! It does not deliver presents to those who will not _work!_ ”

“So it was the day we were getting graded on the solos we’d been supposed to memorize,” says Quentin. “Which, again — nobody had. There were like, the three kids who’d been taking piano lessons since they were babies and already knew how music worked, and the rest was just — disasters, all the way down. So I don’t know what it was about me that set her off, if it was just the terrible fourth-grade recorder solo that broke the camel’s back or if it was some fucked up thing where she could like, subliminally sense weakness because I was shy and weird, but she just starts tearing into me. Calling me lazy, telling me I’d never graduate high school with an attitude like that — like, it was unhinged.”

“ _So_ unprofessional,” Julia says, earnestly disgusted.

Kady snorts. “Yeah, that’s one word for it.”

“I was like, already up on my feet,” Julia says, “yelling about how she was being unfair, I was gonna tell my parents, if we weren’t playing it right it was because she was bad at teaching, et cetera. But she was totally zeroed in on Q. She wouldn’t fucking _stop_.”

“And it’s funny because on the one hand, she picked like, the one insecurity I didn’t actually have,” says Quentin. “Like, I knew I was good at _school_ , duh. But on the other hand, everyone in my class staring at me while a teacher yelled was basically my worst nightmare, and I had this thing when I was a kid where whenever I got really embarrassed I’d start to cry.”

“Oh no,” Luisa says, sympathetic hand over her heart.

“Yeah,” he says. “So I’m like — sniffling and wiping my nose and getting snot everywhere and probably red in the face and totally praying for an earthquake to come and swallow me whole before I start full-on bawling in the living room. And then she takes out her teacher recorder, all — listen, I’m going to show you how it’s done and you’re going to practice now, it’s not that hard if you just work, whatever. Still talking straight to me the whole time, even though, again, I was like the ninth kid in a row who’d fucked it up. But when she starts to play —”

“It doesn’t work,” Julia says, a victorious smirk spreading on her face all these years later, now that they both know exactly what went down. “The notes are all wrong, it sounds like shit — she can’t play any melody on it, at all.”

“She got totally flustered,” said Quentin. “Freaking out, like, _did one of you do this_ , taking it apart to see if it had broken. And then she grabs one of the spares, and the second she blows into it —”

“It was like a fart noise kazoo,” Julia says, laughing. “A woodwind whoopee cushion.”

“The class _lost_ it,” says Quentin. “I mean, we were fourth graders, you can imagine. Just — complete chaos. And _then_ Julia says —”

“Ms. Weissman,” she echoes, batting her eyes, “do you need to be excused?”

“Pandemonium,” he says. “I almost feel bad for her, thinking about it now.”

“I don’t,” says Julia.

Quentin shakes his head. “Anyway. She had no control after that, the rest of the year. Just none. The second class started, it was just — fart noises and screeching noises and even the good kids cracking up all over again. I think she changed schools after that. Either way, no one was looking at _me_ in music class anymore.” He shakes his head, looking at his best friend and smiling. “Because of Julia, it turns out.” 

“I’d do it again,” she says, out loud but he knows it’s just for him.

“Damn,” says Penny. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

“That story’s kind of amazing, though,” says Rishi. “I’m a little afraid of you now, but, you know. Still.”

“Yeah, I’m kinda jealous,” says Quentin. “I definitely don’t have anything that good.”

“Are you sure?” say Serena. She brushes her hand against his. “Think back. I definitely thought I won the science fair on my merits as a young botanist until today.”

He shrugs. “I mean, the first time I _knew_ I was doing magic was my Brakebills interview, while the dean like, berated me to my face. I think I probably did some matter work or illusion shit when I was doing card tricks as a kid, but — nothing I can really point to and say, yeah, that was definitely magic.”

Julia swats his arm. “Q — my unicorn.”

“Your what?” says Quentin. “Ow, by the way.”

“Sorry, I got excited,” she said. “But — I had that unicorn I’d painted at one of those like, ceramics places that does kids’ birthday parties,” she says, talking fast, “and I’d given a name and I talked to it all the time. And then, you were at my house, remember? And Mackenzie and I got in a fight, and she picked it up off my shelf and threw it on the ground and it shattered, and I like, hid under the covers and started sobbing hysterically.”

“Oh yeah,” Quentin says, vaguely remembering. “And then it turned out it wasn’t even broken.”

Julia holds her palms together as if in prayer. “Please use your brain cells for like, five seconds.”

“— Oh, shit,” he says as it clicks. “It — _was_ broken? And I — fixed it. But — are you sure?”

“Quentin,” she says, “I watched it shatter. The fucking horn came off. Trust me. It was broken.”

“Why don’t I remember that, then?” he says, confused. “If I was the one who picked it up.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” says Luisa. “Your brain stores things the way that make sense. That’s not always the same as the way things are.” She smiles. “That’s like, insanely cute by the way.”

Quentin rolls his eyes, a little embarrassed but not really minding. “That’s me, I guess.”

Julia squeezes his hand.

The conversation drifts after that, and Quentin tunes out, a little. Enjoying just — the warmth and the water and the comfortable ease of the conversation. He thinks about that day in Ms. Weissman’s class — for years, like well into adulthood, he’d thought of that story and felt so humiliated all over again, why? Because he was a nine-year-old who cried when an adult yelled at him for no reason? Jesus, he found a way to hate himself even for that. He thinks that even not that long ago he would have managed to find in this new spin on it some proof of his weakness, shame that even then he needed Julia too much, instead of feeling freshly grateful to have someone who’s loved him so fiercely for so long. He thinks about the last spellshare, its collective joy and collaborative magic, and how he couldn’t even enjoy it because he was trapped in his own fucking head, so stuck on the story he was telling that he couldn’t accept the story happening all around him as something real. He thinks he still doesn’t know right now if he’s out of there for good, but he’s trying to enjoy the breeze while he can.

*

He’s back in Fillory that week, and that first moment is still a shock to the system, its brambled magic hitting him like falling face-first into — well, into a pile of brambles. Prickling all over his edges, taking a minute to settle around him, ugly and ill-fitting.

 _I want to fucking die_ , says the voice in his head, and he thinks, _I know, I know, it sucks, but it’s okay_ , like his inner monologue is a cat that doesn’t want to get into the carrier, and it — helps, actually.

Twenty-three drops him off in the castle this time; once he adjusts to the magic, he sees Eliot there, smiling to see him. “Hi,” he says. “I know you’re obviously going to get there anyway, but, um — I kind of wanted to be the one to show you.”

“Show me what?” Quentin asks.

“You’ll see,” Eliot says, and loops an arm around his shoulders to steer him through the stone halls to the correct exit. Quentin knows where they’re going, obviously, but he doesn’t mind. It’s kind of nice, letting Eliot do his excited host thing even though Quentin’s not exactly a guest.

As they step out into the sunlight and the mild Fillorian winter chill, snow it really ought to be too warm for dusting bare branches and distant evergreens picturesquely, Quentin says, “So what am I — oh.”

There’s a sign hanging above the bare patch of soil where he’s been working, wood cut or magicked at perfect right angles to hang in a long rectangle like a banner, painted with the words: GARDEN OF BROKEN OBJECTS. It’s unmistakably Eliot’s work; Quentin recognizes the style from hand-made party invitations, the brushstrokes from the murals he used to paint for Teddy’s room. The letters are black, elegant with a playful flair, but the first in each word is thick and teeming with color, illustrated like an initial out of an illuminated manuscript colored by some medieval monk scribing away, only mixed in with vines and blooming flowers are — broken pieces, scissors split in half and cups cracked into jagged parts and scattered through the O the pieces of a coffee maker, a round green pot sitting contentedly in the letter’s empty center.

Quentin can’t speak, looking at it. It feels like — he swallows, thinking he might cry.

“I was thinking,” Eliot says, “about what you said — how it’s weird for you, being here, because of the ways you thought about it before, and — I know this doesn’t really change any of that, but I just thought it might be — nice, for you. If you had something that was — yours, from the beginning. Something that wasn’t in the books, you know? Plus, you know me. I get crafty when I get bored. Trying to lean into that, a little — idle hands, and all that.” He shifts his weight, hands clasped behind his back. “So — what do you think?”

“El —” Quentin tries to find the words for what he thinks, but he can’t get any further than “Jesus, El —” He throws his arms around Eliot, squeezing him close, trying to hold him close enough to like, psychically transfer some of what he feels.

“Okay,” Eliot says, laughter in his voice, hugging Quentin back. “So — that means you like it?”

God, he’s impossible. “Yeah, El, I like it,” he says, “it’s like one of the nicest things anyone’s done for me in my entire life, I guess you could say I fucking _like_ it —”

“I mean I just wanted to be sure,” says Eliot, “because you know, I could take it down, or re-do it if you didn’t like it — I know the color scheme is sort of my aesthetic more than yours, but in my defense, you don’t really _have_ an aesthetic — but if you wanted something more, like, minimalist —”

“You are so fucking annoying,” Quentin says, cheek pressed against his chest. “It’s perfect, dumbass, I mean that. It’s perfect, it’s perfect, it’s fucking perfect, it — god, I feel like it fixed something in me that I didn’t even know was broken — thank you.”

“Okay,” Eliot says, finally appeased. “Well. I’m glad.”

And like, fuck this stupid planet, still, but right now, Quentin’s glad too. Right this second, there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

*

Josh has materials already set up at a long wooden table when Quentin finds him in the corner of the castle with the cabinets of gardening supplies. When he sees Quentin approaching, he grins and waves. “Q train to Second Avenue!”

“JMZ to Brooklyn,” Quentin returns with a grin. “So what am I working with here, timewise?”

“It’s a tricky one,” says Josh. “Just a couple days till harvesting for maximum potential. Sometimes those short cycles sort of make up for it by being kind of concentrated in terms of power, but other times they’re weaker — I haven’t figured out yet how to tell in advance which it’ll be.”

“And for a spell this demanding,” says Quentin, “if it’s not superpowered, it might not have enough juice to finish, even if we get it right.”

“Yeah,” says Josh. “But the next cycle doesn’t start until March, so I figured it was worth a shot. At least we’ll be able to get enough to tell whether the fringed pigweed's helping.”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. “I have a good feeling about this one, anyway. You want to run that wormwood prep spell you were telling me about while I hack out the duration adjustments?”

“Sounds like a plan,” says Josh, and they get to work.

The casting starts as rough as all the other castings have; once he’s wrangled it into a connection Quentin asks _what do you want_ , and he gets back that now familiar jolt of _fuck you_. But it’s easier to stay focused now, stay patient; the violence in the knife’s magic isn’t brushing up against his own internal fight. He can wait for it to — tire itself out, almost. Telling it, over and over, _I know. I know, it sucks. But you’re okay. It’s okay._ And it does settle, eventually. Enough to work with the spell through the closing.

Quentin frowns at it when he’s done, the spot in the soil where his magic is working.

“That seemed smooth,” Josh remarks.

“Yeah, it was definitely — better, than it’s been,” Quentin says. “But — I don’t know. Something still feels — off. Like — like trying to shove together two puzzle pieces that don’t match, or — I don’t know.”

“Huh,” says Josh. “Well, at least we’ll know one way or the other soon.”

“Yeah.” Quentin looks at the sign again, the sign Eliot painted because he wanted Quentin to feel like he had a place to come back to, and thinks: At least I have this. The sign, and the person who made it, someone who would care that much and show it so sweetly, waiting when he returns.

*

It’s not so bad, this time. He Travels in and there’s that moment, each time, of dissonance and resistance, but — it’s like his body adjusts. Like jumping into a lake, that full-body blow`that settles until you can’t even remember being cold, even though the water hasn’t changed. He still hears it sometimes, that _I want to die_ voice, but it means less than it used to. He’s learning to see it as a habit he hasn’t quite broken or outgrown, but not anything he needs to be afraid of. He thinks _I want to die_ and he thinks _I know, it’s rough,_ and it sits back, mollified, and he moves on.

Eliot is still coming by each day he’s there, to do magic and ask about the spell adjustments he’s making and sit and talk on the grass. Quentin keeps staying longer than he plans to, the moment the spell calms itself slipping past while Eliot makes him laugh with his impressions of the dinner guests at the recent diplomatic summit or his description of the Fillorian symbols and folk heroes being considered for the proposed national currency by the Committee On Iconographic Nominations (“Wait — _COIN_? Seriously?” Quentin says, and Eliot laughs and says “Fen spent a while on that one, she was _very_ proud”). On the fourth day, after he finishes sprinkling some ground amphibole and looping the pool so it’ll actually stick to the casting, Quentin says, “You know, I’m actually doing pretty okay with like — being here, and all. So if you have, like, important stuff to do — you shouldn’t feel, like, obligated to check in on me.”

Eliot smiles. “I do have important stuff to do. But luckily nothing so urgent it can’t wait a little. And —” He shrugs. “I’m not, like, volunteering at a retirement center to give back to the community. I like seeing you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, smiling back. “I do, too. I just — I’d hate to think that I’m taking you away from your actual life.”

“You could never,” Eliot says, and it’s a small thing but Quentin’s throat tightens because — god, Eliot’s always had a heart visible from outer space if you knew how to look for it, but this way he’s learned to let it shine out of him, easy and unadorned — it’s just a lot. When Quentin thinks about the years he’s spent trying to hide his own heart, and all the reasons life has given Eliot to hide his, how hard he’s had to work to become a person who doesn’t flinch away from letting it be seen — he hopes he can learn to be brave like that. He wants to learn.

Out loud he gestures to the soil. “I don’t have a great feeling about this one.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. “It started off strong, but — I don’t know, this knife, something about the magic in it, I’m having trouble getting it to work with me. Or I’m having trouble, like — directing the magic right. It almost reminds me of, like, gym class in middle school, or something. Like — I’m fucking trying to aim the ball right, but three weeks into drills I’m still not even in the same zip code as the basket, and I’m feeling pretty stuck on how to get closer.”

“Sorry you’re having to relive that particular trauma,” Eliot says, a slight smile playing at his mouth.

“Thanks,” Quentin says, rolling his eyes. “You were probably actually good at basketball, weren’t you.”

Eliot laughs. “People always assumed that, because I was so tall. But they were quickly disappointed. Or relieved, I guess, if they were on the other team.”

“So you were in the same hell as the rest of us,” Quentin says.

“Yeah, anything requiring that level of hand-eye coordination was sadly beyond me,” Eliot says. “I actually think being tall made it worse in some ways. When I was little, like maybe kindergarten or first grade, I had this like, lucky ball — just some regular softball, I don’t remember how I wound up with it. Anyway, I liked it because I used to take it out back when things got — loud — inside the house, and I’d spend, like, hours out there until my mom was yelling at me to come back in, just tossing it up and down. And I was actually pretty good at that. Like, I could throw it up pretty high into the air, and I never dropped it.”

“Huh,” Quentin says, picturing it: Eliot small and soft, alone and trying to make the most of it under the wide Midwestern sky. It twists at his heart, but there’s something else in the image that’s nagging at him.

“My dad threw it out eventually because I didn’t want to make my bed,” Eliot says, looking down. “And then I hit my first growth spurt, and I think getting so much further from the ground so fast fucked with my spatial reasoning or something, because I couldn’t catch for shit after that. Too bad, because it’s not like my classmates were hard up for reasons to — anyway.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says slowly. “Eliot — are you sure that’s what happened?”

Eliot knits his brows together. “I’m definitely sure I sucked at sports as a kid and always, yes.”

“No, but before, like —” Quentin shakes his head. “You’re _telekinetic_ , Eliot. Don’t you think that might have been — helping you out, when you were — playing out back?”

“But that was years before I could do magic,” Eliot says. “I didn’t do magic until — well. You know the first time I did magic.” He gives Quentin a funny look, like he’s confused that Quentin would make him think about that and trying not to be hurt by it.

And god, it’s not like Quentin wants to dwell there, but he feels surer of this the more he thinks about it, and he just — he wants Eliot to know. “That’s what I’m saying, though — like, okay, a bunch of us were talking about, what if it’s actually bullshit that magic comes from pain? Or, not bullshit exactly, because obviously it does, but — what if that’s not the _only_ place it comes from? And what if — what if when you focus on pain, you miss all these other places where magic was happening all along? Like — I always thought my first time was my admissions interview with Fogg fucking screaming at me, but Julia’s a thousand percent sure I fixed some unicorn of hers when we were kids. And I never thought about that because at Brakebills you never hear, like — think back on some weird, inexplicable shit that’s happened in your life, and think about times you got really lucky, or times you wanted to help someone — you just hear the pain shit. But magic’s more than that. So —”

“But —” Eliot stops, throat working, eyes bright. “But I don’t — like are you sure, I mean —”

Quentin shrugs. “I mean — I wasn’t there. But what makes more sense, Eliot? That you were a kindergarten softball prodigy whose athletic talent got demolished by a growth spurt, or that you were a magician who didn’t know it using the magic that’s most yours to — make yourself feel safe, when you needed it? Little kids _really bad_ at catching things.”

“So you’re saying —” Eliot looks at him, half-desperate.

“I don’t think the first time you did magic was — what you’ve always thought it was,” Quentin says. “I think you were doing magic before. In ways that — were not — that were good.”

“I —” Eliot swallows, eyes darting wildly like there’s something he’s afraid to look head on. Quentin watches him take this in: the way he shakes his head, like it can’t be real; the pain of the memory opened up fresh; the fear on his face — fear Quentin knows well, in Eliot and in himself. The fear of falling for something too good to be true. The fear of hope.

“Well,” Eliot says finally, voice thick, “I guess I know what I’m talking about in therapy this week." He gives a cut-off laugh, then says, soft and sincere, “Thank you.”

Quentin smiles at him. “Of course.”

The funny thing is — Quentin doesn’t super care about Logan Kinnear. Or, like — he cares, in like a basic human way, that there was a kid who died before he was old enough to decide if he was going to take the chance to outgrow the worst of what someone had made him. And he cares about Logan Kinnear as a piece of Eliot’s past, a splinter at the core of him that might never be fully dislodged. But to him, Logan Kinnear has always been a story about the fact that Eliot was a kid no one protected or took care of. It’s never felt like a story that said much about who Eliot was, except the part where more than a decade later he’s still beating himself up for something he didn’t even mean to do.

He knows that’s not how Eliot sees it, though. He knows for Eliot, it’s the story at the center of him — the story of his magic, the story of his worst wants and ugliest self. The story that whispered itself to him, every time he found a new way to be alone. So if Quentin’s managed to help him release that, or shift it, or even just make space to let other stories in — Eliot doesn’t need the help, remaking himself. But Quentin knows how much this one hurts. He’s glad, to be able to lift it a little. It feels like mending a broken object, almost. The gift of watching something become more itself.

*

“Did you recognize me?”

Jane studies the chess board, moves her bishop. “When do you mean?”

“The first time you saw me — in Timeline One, or whatever,” Quentin says. “Did you — or, your self on the linear plane, I guess — did she know I was the one who’d given you the time key, when you were a kid? Or the one who helped you, in the trap?”

Jane smiles. “No. I wish I had — it might have saved me a few loops. But I suppose I accomplished my mission, in the end. If I’d known you wound up at the mosaic I might have made some unfounded logistical assumptions that undermined the plan.”

The buzzing in her cottage is still here, although he’s starting to flicker in and out of noticing it. Quentin moves his rook. “Doesn’t that drive you crazy? How it’s all so — random. I keep thinking about what you said, and things are — better, but it’s like — I’ll think, okay, you did it, you survived. But I kind of — didn’t. If things had been different, I wouldn’t have come back from — that. It doesn’t — _mean_ anything that I survived. I just got fucking lucky.”

“Everyone needs luck,” Jane says. “Some more than others. But life is full of — disease and disaster, violence and dark chance. Death is a roll of the dice.”

“So you’re saying, what,” says Quentin. “That it doesn’t matter, and I should just — be grateful for what I got?”

“I’m saying survival is luck,” says Jane. “Living is a choice. That’s the one that matters. And it means whatever you make it mean.” She slides her bishop over, captures his other rook. “The other time loops — the horror of each of them — that was real, for me. They taught me the stakes, over and over. And they taught me about — myself, my enemy, my power. About you, and the others who kept getting — snarled in the net. That’s what mattered — what I took with me. What I did with it, after. Well —” She raises a mirthful eyebrow. “To me, at least. I assume to poor Henry they mean something different.”

Quentin thinks about the mosaic. He’d been so sure, for so long, that he knew what it meant: a map to the version of himself that was happy, all roads leading to Eliot, a castle with the drawbridge securely raised. And then it turned out he didn’t need Eliot, but — it still mattered, didn’t it? Proof of concept after all, not like he’d thought but for him: that he could find his way to happiness, that he could learn how to tend to growing things, if he worked for it. Even himself. “I guess that makes sense.” He moves a pawn. “It really has been helping, what you said. A lot, actually.”

“I’m glad,” she says.

He touches his knight, moves instead another pawn. “The other Quentins, in the thirty-nine loops — did any of them —”

She studies his face. “Did any of them what?”

He tries to think of how to phrase what he wants to know, then shakes his head. “Never mind. I was going to ask if any of them — wound up like I did, or did something similar — but I guess you’d say it doesn’t matter, right? Or it — shouldn’t. Like — whoever I was, in those other lives, it doesn’t have to point to some kind of — essential inescapable truth of me. I can always — choose. So as long as I keep doing that then — who cares, right?”

Jane smiles at him. “Is that what I would say?”

“I —” Quentin rolls his eyes. “Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t the more pressing question,” she says, “what _you_ would say?”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “You sound like a fucking therapist.”

“Fascinating,” she says. “What does that mean to you?”

Quentin ignores this. He’s like — sixty percent sure it’s a joke, although he’s also not really sure what her frame of reference for therapy is. “I guess I would say that, too. That — it’s who I am now that matters. For worse or — hopefully for better. So.”

“Wise choice,” she says. “In my inexpert opinion.” She moves her queen. “Checkmate.”

“I give up,” Quentin says. “And I should get to Whitespire anyway — the knife is probably as ready as it’ll ever be, by now.”

Jane nods, spreads her hands to prepare to send him over. “If you visit again — and I would enjoy that greatly — could I ask you to bring me something to read? It’s been ages since I got lost in a good book.”

Quentin smiles. “Yeah. I can. And I will — I’ll come back.” He’ll be around to choose that, he thinks, and lets himself marvel a little at how easy it feels, today.

*

“Yeah,” Quentin announces, “it’s another no-go.”

Josh says, “Let me see?” Quentin hands over the piece of metal. “Well. It looks — a little more knife-shaped, at least. Maybe the cycle was too short, and it just needed more time?”

“I don’t think so,” says Quentin. “It feels — wrong. Not like something on its way to wholeness, but — I don’t know, off somehow.” He shakes his head. “You know, to be totally real with you, I recently had this like pretty profound emotional catharsis slash mild epiphany, and based on how things have gone in the past I really thought that would do it. But now I’m kind of stumped.”

“Huh,” says Josh. “Well, hey — congratulations on the personal growth.”

“Thanks, man,” says Quentin, touched.

“I know you’re always jetting right back off to California,” says Josh, “but I gotta put in a plug for today’s dinner — the stuff I pulled in the greenhouse today came out sublime, and after tweaking the sauce for ages I think I’ve really outdone myself.”

Quentin smiles. “Yeah, why not?” He is always jetting right back off, but — that’s habit, at this point. An old story. He’s not afraid of what staying a little longer will do to him. And it’ll be nice, to sit with his friends and just — talk.

Josh was not bullshitting about dinner. There’s these like reinvented tater tots but fancy with garlic aioli, roast chicken covered in some sauce he can’t identify but that is maybe going to ruin all other chicken for him, some kind of side with roasted beets and goat cheese that looks weird and tastes incredible. Quentin feels a little awkward once he’s sitting down with a group of people who live and work together so often even the most begrudgingly cordial pair (Tick and Twenty-three, as far as he can tell) can practically finish each other’s sentences, but once dinner gets underway he finds he enjoys just — taking it in. The inside jokes and well-worn grooves of passive-aggression, Fen’s friendly inquiries about his life in California and Margo’s monologues about the Lorians, the sense beneath it all that there’s a team here, prickly and persistently half-annoyed but working together to build something good — it feels good, just to be around that. Josh keeps making these dorky puns and Margo keeps laughing at them, not like you laugh at everything someone says when you’re into them but just like she actually thinks they’re funny, and doesn’t care who knows it. It’s nice.

Eliot arrives a few minutes late and flushed from an errand to one of the river towns that lasted longer than expected, his cheeks pink from the cool air. He’s in good spirits, updating the table on both important developments for infrastructure planning and gossipy anecdotes from locals, Quentin gathers from context, the assembled group has plenty of experience with. He ribs Tick gently enough that Tick only gets a little stuffy about it, but slyly enough that Rafe keeps giggling and then covering his mouth, eyes wide; he listens, sweetly supportive, while Fen proudly describes how she managed to get the COIN — like, come on — to come to consensus on a voting procedure for winnowing ideas down. It warms something in Quentin to watch him here, in this place he stumbled into and has somehow made a home. He feels his own resistance to Fillory melting away, seeing how comfortable and content Eliot is here, not just keeping Quentin company but lighting up the whole table with his laughter and his love. Happy here not because once it chose him but because he chose it, over and over — chose Margo and chose trying and and chose befriending the wife he never wanted to marry and winning over the advisor who tried to depose him.

Eliot’s just — he’s so good. He’s so much less afraid of that than he used to be. It feels so right, to see him like this, his finer layers stripped off to sit and eat in fine but plain linen, holding court. No longer a king, but still spectacular, with his noble profile and his elegant hands. Quentin should stay more often. Not just for the food, although — he grabs another roll, obscenely soft and warm, and spreads on it a dab of whipped butter, perfectly salted.

Dessert is a raspberry tart so good that when Quentin bites into it he lets out a startled little moan which thank god no one but Eliot seems to hear, and which Eliot lets slide with nothing beyond an amused quirk to his mouth. Wine is poured and slowly sipped; the table thins out as people set off for final duties or visits outside the castle or early bedtimes, until it’s just Margo, Eliot, and Josh. To the side, the fireplace crackles orange-gold, filling the room with light and warmth against the dark winter sky beyond the windows. 

Quentin probably should have grabbed Twenty-three before he stood to go, or get him now before he gets too hard to find, but he’s enjoying the mellowness of the evening, the close coziness of the remaining quartet. Also, he ate what feels like his own bodyweight in food and he does not want to stand up yet. He kind of embarrassingly cannot remember the last time he was this full, and realizes it must have been one of the many miserable wasted nights after he left New York, which — god, he thinks, not for the first time recently, what a fucking wreck he was then, remembering all the shit he kept putting in his mouth trying to fill something that wouldn’t be filled, escaping his mind by fucking up his body until he was coughing up a lung or heaving up vodka in some bathroom, chasing some fresh proof for the self-loathing that poisoned everything he did. He doesn’t feel anything like that now. He feels like he kind of regrets the third roll and maybe most of the second serving of chicken, but mostly he feels content, sitting here with good friends after a good meal. He thinks again about Eliot’s rules, what he said about watching out when you need it too much. Maybe that’s the difference: what feels like something you’re choosing, instead of something you’re hiding behind.

“Bambi,” says Eliot, reaching a hand over Margo with soft care, “you seem quiet. Everything okay?”

She gives him a weary smile. “I’m exhausted. But okay. Jesus, though, I think we’ve gotta move getting to an agreement on the deputy kingship situation up on the priority list. If I go much longer without some kind of actual break, heads are gonna start to roll.”

“And not in the kinda sexy Karen O way,” says Josh.

“I feel that,” Eliot murmurs. “We need a vacation. To replenish, renourish, et cetera. Do some of that self-care shit my therapist loves to tell me about.”

“You guys should come out to San Diego,” Quentin says. “Rent a place, we can hang out. The weather’s a hell of a lot better than New York right now. It’s not exactly beach weather most days, but if you come by our house, the selkie colony usually keeps the water warm enough to swim even in January.”

Margo and Eliot clasp hands and have one of their weird conversations with their eyes. Josh raises his eyebrows at Quentin like _Here they go again_ , and Quentin shrugs like _What are you gonna do?_

Margo says, “I don’t hate that idea.”

Eliot says, “I kind of love that idea.”

“We’ll keep you updated,” Margo says. “The beach does hold a certain luxurious appeal.”

“We could meet your selkie friend,” Eliot says, smirking, and Quentin rolls his eyes and gives him the finger — although, actually, Eliot and Edine would probably get along great. “Speaking of self-care — I was on my feet basically sunrise to sunset, and I think actually tonight I am going to choose to love myself by being very boring and going the fuck to bed." He stands from the table, saying goodnight to Quentin and Margo with a kiss each on the cheek, and to Josh with an affectionate ruffle of his hair.

“I’m out, too,” says Josh. “Gotta wrap up this stage of reorganizing the spice cabinet before my vision evaporates overnight. My King.” He gives Margo a chaste kiss on the back of her hand, a weirdly courtly gesture that makes her smile somehow both like she means it and like she’s in on the joke. Then he salutes Quentin. “Q’s on first — talk in a few about next steps for the knife?”

“Hoberwhat’s on second,” Quentin returns, lifting his glass. “You know it.” He watches Josh amble out, strolling unhurriedly into the corridor beyond the double doors.

“So,” Margo says once they’re alone, “your first court dinner of the new regime. What’d you think?”

“It was great,” he says sincerely. “I feel like I’m about to fall into a coma.”

“I know, right?” she says. “We’re a little spoiled, chef-wise. He’s really made things his own here.”

“I get the Josh thing now,” he says abruptly. “I mean — not that you were like, sweating my approval, or anything, but — you know. I — sorry I didn’t, before.”

Margo grins. “He’s fun, right?”

“Yeah,” Quentin admits. “And like — chill. Feel like we could all kind of — learn from that.”

Margo’s brows furrow quizzically above her smile. “I always thought it was so weird you didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t — _dis_ like him,” Quentin says. “We just didn’t — click.”

“Yeah,” says Margo, “and I thought that was weird.”

“Really?” Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Why?” Although — it’s funny: he knows he didn’t vibe with Josh, before. Like, pretty recently, actually, he found him totally annoying and insufferable. But he can’t remember why.

“Because.” Margo shakes her head, as if to say _Isn’t it obvious?_ “He’s like you.”

Quentin almost chokes on his wine. “You think _Josh Hoberman_ is like _me?_ ”

Margo’s face goes dead serious. “Hey, watch it. That’s my man you’re talking about.” Then she cracks up. “Oh my god, can you imagine? People say shit like that for real, that’s so wild. No wonder I don’t fucking miss America.” She takes a drink. “Seriously, though — yeah. I do. You don’t?”

“I’m having… trouble making the connection,” Quentin manages.

“That thing of yours,” Margo says, “where you just — love shit, totally and completely, with every fucking piece of you — where you can just be open with your love like that — he has that thing. Like, he doesn’t give a shit — he just likes what he likes, and he doesn’t think twice about showing it.” Her smile goes wistful. “I’m not like that. Loving things, loving people — it doesn’t come easy for me.”

Quentin thinks about the way she looks at Eliot, the way her eyes soften when she talks about him. The way she sought Quentin out, when she didn’t have to, to fix what he’d been the one to break between them. “I think you’re selling yourself short, Margo.”

She looks down at the table. “I’m working on it. But — it helps, you know? Having people around who are — they just do it.”

Quentin runs his thumb along the edge of his wineglass, wondering if he does — just do that. Just love things. He has the sudden impulse to down the rest of the glass; pushes it away from himself, leans back in his chair. “I don’t know if I’m one of them. Maybe I used to be, but —” He shakes his head. “I feel like I spent so long — running from myself, and — shoving all that away — I feel like that’s not me. Not anymore.”

“I get that,” Margo says. “It hurt too bad to live with, so you tried to close up your heart and throw away the key. I’ve been there. The difference between us and Josh is, he never bothered to try. I admire that a lot, to tell you the truth. But the difference between you and me is — you’re no good at it, Q. You’re even worse than Eliot. Whatever you think of yourself, anyone can tell, just looking at you, how much you fucking feel. Me, on the other hand?” She smiles sadly. “I got real good at it. I was the fucking best.”

“Margo —” He reaches for her hand on the table and freezes right before he touches her, unsure if he’ll be welcome. But she lifts her palm and brings him in. “I really think — maybe not anyone who looks at you, but — anyone who knows you, at all — any of those people at dinner tonight — we know who you are.”

“Thanks,” she says, a slight catch in her voice.

Quentin drags his hand back, feeling awkward. “Hey — I don’t know where Twenty-three went off to — is it okay if I crash here? Like, is there a spare room, or —”

“Yeah, Q,” she says. “There’s always room for you here, if you want it.”

And — how unexpected, how lucky and how strange — tonight, Quentin does.

*

He thinks about his conversation with Margo while he’s running the next day, listening to The Hold Steady and appreciating the ease afforded by the relative January cool. He doesn’t see himself the way she does — open with his love. He’s spent so long hating himself. It keeps striking him fresh, each time bigger and more encompassing, each time startling him with the depths of it, its viciousness. He’s spent so long hating even that — even his love, which should have been the best of him. Like it was an embarrassment, tangled up with all the things he wished he didn’t want, the way that all wanting felt like too much because he could never trust that anything beyond nothing might be his. Because he couldn’t trust himself to hold on. He’d hated himself so much he tried to cut his love away, and sometimes he thinks he’ll carry the shame of that forever. He feels the sick heat of it filing his body, spreading through his veins and his lungs. Twisting him back into the shape he knows best.

Then he keeps running; then he keeps breathing; then he focuses on his feet and his legs and the air going in and out and his steps left and right and the pounding drums and churning guitars and Craig Finn’s spit-shout-singing voice in his ear and eventually it’s like the exertion crowds everything else out, one heat replacing another which evaporates in the air, and he thinks: well, at least it didn’t work.

He thinks of what Margo said — that however much he might have wanted to, he never was good at hiding his love. It’s true, isn’t it? All those years trying to run from that piece of him that cared, that wanted and mourned, that hurt and that once in a very long while made him feel like every hideous thing had been worth it to get to where he was — he’d fought himself so hard and it hadn’t even worked. Shit, maybe that’s why he never vibed with Josh — because maybe Margo was right about that too. Maybe Josh is like him, only he had the fucking nerve to not be sorry about it. Quentin remembers what Penny said about Julia: that she’s asking the world for a lot, and not sorry for even a bit of it. He thinks about Eliot, opening his heart horizon-wide, letting people in and shining love out. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever get there, but he wants to get closer, at least. He wants to believe in his own heart. He thinks about what Jane said, that what matters isn’t what happens, but what you do with it. He thinks if he does nothing else with the whole long rest of his second life, he wants to love.

_I’ve got a lot of friends that are getting back in touch, and it’s a pretty good feeling — yeah, it feels pretty good —_

And it’s that strange alchemy of movement and heat again, his blood pumping and breath working like a spell. He holds his love like a wish in his chest and he feels something lifting, something rising, something shifting, some unspoken fear clearing like sweat off skin, like smoke in the air, and he’s not dumb enough to think it’s going to last forever, but in that moment it’s like he can see it: the clear path of the future, a road he’s not afraid to walk down with head held high. Only himself, ready to meet whatever comes. It feels like hope; it feels like joy. And he knows it’s probably just like, the endorphins or whatever, but for a second it feels like magic, too, coursing through him, transforming him in his very cells. The magic he knows best: the magic of potential, which is the magic of broken things.

*

Quentin and Serena walk the two miles home from the sushi place they met up at for dinner, holding hands and laughing. The night is still and he can see stars twinkling in the sky above them; the moon is nearly full. He needs to look up the date of the next new moon; he has to sort out the likelihood of being able to duplicate the compass, calculate how many trials he can safely plant in the space he’s got. Maybe he should look into getting a planter for the porch, for experiments; he’d need to cut the radius down, but he doesn’t think that’s impossible.

At the steps of her apartment Serena starts to get her keys, hesitates, then turns to him, mouth set firm and eyes a little nervous. Quentin waits to see what’s on her mind.

“So,” she says, and her words are careful and sure, “when we started seeing each other, I told you that I don’t do, like, perma-ambiguity, and eventually, I’d need to like, get official or get out, basically. And — and I was thinking yesterday and realized that, um — it’s now. I — I like you a lot, and I know it might not seem like it really matters, because I know you’re not — seeing anyone else, but — this is how it works, for me, like, I’ve — anyway. So — you don’t have to give me an answer right now, but I can’t — I can’t keep seeing you until I know, so.” She shakes herself a little. “Okay. That’s — said.” She looks at him expectantly.

“Oh,” Quentin says, surprised but only slightly; he did know this was coming, and he’d started to look forward to it, a flurrying anticipation building in his stomach on nights they spent together and mornings they woke up tangled in each other’s limbs. He lets himself picture it, before he answers: the sweet steadiness of knowing they’d chosen a place at each other’s side, the excitement of letting themselves shift from playing around to building something strong and real. Meeting her family, her friends, learning the names of the coworkers she complains about most; showing her the pieces of his past they haven’t had space for yet, the gradual unveiling of ever deeper truths. Cooking together in her apartment, watching movies in the house by the bay. His arm around her shoulders, her head in his lap. Birthday presents, anniversaries, reading each other’s favorite books. Her laughter after sex and the face she makes when she’s thinking of how to say what she wants to say and all the dozens of inflections and habits he hasn’t had time to memoirze yet. And meanwhile — meanwhile she’d be memorizing him, too; he’d be handing over his whole self, piece by piece, trusting it to her careful hands.

He could do that, he realizes. Feeling sturdy and sure. He’s not afraid. He could have — all of it, the touching and the talking and the fighting and the fucking and the figuring it out, the easy joys and hard work of it — he can choose love. With his whole open heart. And he wants —

— he _wants_ , he realizes, with a sudden fierce clarity that nearly knocks him breathless — a wanting that fills him up like sunrise —

“I’m so sorry,” Quentin says, stricken. “I don’t think I can.”

Serena’s face goes pinched, eyebrows shooting up. “Really? You don’t think you _can?_ ”

“I — I’m sorry,” he says again. He means it. He really is sorry. He really wishes —

“Okay,” she says, looking away, “I’m probably going to regret this, but — can I ask why? I mean, things seemed to be —” She clamps her mouth shut. Quentin hates to see it.

“I —” He tries to find the words that will hurt the least, but — he doesn’t think they exist. He’s a terrible liar, anyway. Wincing, he says, “I kind of… have a thing… for my ex.”

Serena barks a bitter laugh. He can’t blame her. “Yeah, that was a bad idea.” She wipes with her knuckle at the corner of her eye, jaw tight. Quentin feels awful. “You didn’t think this was, like, relevant fucking information to share with me at any point in the last five months?”

“I didn’t — I figured it out like, literally just now, I swear,” Quentin says, desperate for her to believe him even as he knows he has no right to ask for that.

“Yeah. Sure.” She nods, looking at the ground. Quentin feels like such a fucking jerk. “You have shitty fucking timing, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he says softly, full of regret. She’s been so good to him. “I really do.”

*

When he gets home from the long and lonely bus ride spent listening to the National, Luisa waves to him from the couch, where she’s drinking a spiked seltzer that doesn’t seem to be her first. “Heyyy,” she calls, sing-song. “Guess which bitch got furloughed!” She jabs a thumb at her chest.

“Oh shit,” says Quentin, distracted from his own problems. “Again?”

“It’s that time of year,” she says with false cheer. “And no one’s had a change of heart about how to fund or structure the organizations literally trying to protect people from a dying planet yet, so.”

He grabs a beer from the fridge — beer and break-ups are a sacred relationship, like, that one can’t not be allowed — and joins her on the couch. “Shit. So what are you going to do? Go full-tilt on access stuff again?”

“Probably,” she says. “I might start job-hunting, too.”

“Really?” he asks. “I thought you liked where you were.”

“I do, but —” She shrugs. “The stuff we’re doing now — logistics and comms and relationship management and money shit and petitioning the state magic governance board for secrecy exemptions — it’s important, obviously, and I don’t, like, _hate_ it, but — it’s not where my heart is, you know? The actual magic, the research and the spellcraft — that’s the part I love. And I don’t know when I’m going to get to focus on that, staying there. Plus, it’s been a while. Change is good, sometimes. Keeps things fresh. I figure, I can start seeing what’s out there at least. If some dream job comes around, I’ll hop aboard, and if not, I’ll be back at work in the spring anyway.”

“Makes sense,” he says. “Well. If it makes you feel any better, Serena and I just broke up.”

“Wait, what?” she says, sitting up straight. “No way, that’s worse than my thing. What happened?”

He twists open the bottle and takes a drink. “She asked if I wanted to get serious.”

“And you didn’t?” Luisa says. “I thought you really liked her.”

“I do,” he says. “That’s the fucked up part. I like her a ton, and I feel like, in some — alternate timeline, I could have fallen in love with her, like, for real. But —” He shakes his head. “She said it and I started thinking how it would go, right, the — date nights and Sunday brunches and all the fucking greeting card shit and the fights over whose turn it is to do the dishes, and I realized — I want all that, so bad. And it could have been so good with me and her. But the person I actually want there with me is — Eliot fucking Waugh.” His hair wet from the shower, curling around his face as he grinned at Quentin’s bleary face seeking coffee — Quentin takes another drink. “She deserves better than to be someone’s second choice.”

“Shit,” Luisa says sympathetically. “It sounds like it sucked, but you did the right thing.”

“I should get a T-shirt,” he says. “I acted like a grown-up and all I got was this lousy break-up.”

She laughs. “You wanna mope around for a couple of days and then go to yoga on Friday to resume our responsible lives as mature adults?”

“I never want to go to yoga,” he says.

She grins. “But you will?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Put Netflix on, let’s find something to watch.”

*

He texts Julia about the break-up and then texts back and forth with her for a while trying to explain that yes it’s a huge bummer but no it’s not like cataclysmically devastating and she doesn’t have to come over and be nice to him in person before he realizes that he’s doing it again: writing himself out of the story where he’s loved, proving to himself the story where he’s alone. _Sorry, I’m being a brat_ , he sends, and then: _I’d love to hang, if that’s still on the table_.

 _For you, always_ , she texts back, and he smiles, grateful he decided to let her back in.

“You didn’t have to do the ice cream thing,” he says when she arrives. “I mean — it’s five months, not fifty years. It’s been a shitty couple days, but I’ve been, like. Showering.”

“Ice cream is the law,” she says, “don’t fight me on it.”

“Okay,” he says, accepting his carton and his spoon, “but let’s watch something chill.”

They sit in his bed and put on _This is Spinal Tap_ , which is exactly the comforting blend of dumb and familiar Quentin was craving, not least of all because for some reason Julia thinks it’s the funniest movie in the world and laughs like an idiot the whole way through, every time. Licking the marshmallow off his spoonful of Phish Food he can’t believe he was really almost dumb enough to pass this up, because he thought he — what, wasn’t heartbroken enough to deserve it? What the fuck logic is operating in his brain? Who the fuck needs an excuse to say yes to movies and ice cream with their best friend when she fucking offers?

When the movie ends Julia shuts the screen and looks at him. “So… do you want to talk about it?”

“Do I have a choice?” he says.

She flicks him between the eyes. “You always have a choice.”

“Sorry,” he says. “That was shitty.” Quentin takes a bite of ice cream, thinks that if he has any more he’s going to start feeling sick. He runs a quick cryo spell to keep it frozen and sets it on the ground. “I think what’s throwing me is how weird it feels.”

Julia tilts her head. “Weird how?”

“Like —” He searches for a way to explain it. “Like, technically, I broke up with her, right? So — she’s like, the wronged party here, I should be — not fine, maybe, but — sort of fine. I should feel, like, at peace about it. And instead, even though it was my call, I feel — heartbroken feels sort of strong, but — yeah, I guess. I guess when I think about — what we had, that I don’t have anymore, and what we could have been, and never will — I guess it does feel like a broken heart. Or a — fractured one, at least.” Julia gives him a crooked smile.

“And then,” he says, lying down on his back, “on the other hand, you know, I did it because — I’m in love with my fucking ex-boyfriend who like totally shattered me, and who I thought until like two days ago I was doing a great job of being friends with. And that — that part should suck, right? I should be — pissed at him all over again, and totally fucking furious at myself, and like, life, and also, I don’t know, miserably besotted, or — I mean, whatever, you were there. You know the drill, with me and Eliot. It should feel — awful.”

Julia lies down next to him, propped up on her elbow. “But it doesn’t?”

Quentin — what the actual fuck — can’t quite keep a smile off his face. “No. It really doesn’t. Honestly — it doesn’t even feel like, like what it technically is, like — it doesn’t feel like I’m still hung up on my ex.”

“How does it feel?” she asks.

“It feels —” He gives her a wry grin. “I was going to say it feels like I’m falling in love with my best friend, but, uh — my experience of that is actually pretty traumatic.”

“Mmm,” Julia says, batting her eyelashes, “I get that a lot.”

Quentin laughs. He feels like a million times better already, it’s so nuts that he thought he didn’t want this. He doesn’t know anything about anything. “It feels like — not like something from the past that I can’t let go of, or even something that’s come back. Just like — I’ve been hanging out with this incredible person, and when I’m with him I don’t want to be anywhere else. And I can’t — like, it’s Eliot, how could I be mad about that?”

Juulia makes a sympathetic noise as she nestles her head against his shoulder. “None of this sounds weird to me.”

“But I felt like that about Serena, too,” he says. “I just feel it about Eliot — more. So isn’t that — I don’t know. Like how can either of those things be real, if they’re both — happening at the same time? That’s weird, right?”

“Maybe,” she says. “But — Q, you had a wife in the lifetime you fell in love with Eliot. Were you not in love with her?”

“That’s different,” he protests. “It was like — _god_ , this whole process, across like years, and things were good but, El is honestly so crazy about this shit, like, the amount of time we spent — evolving, or whatever, these different iterations of —”

“Okay,” Julia says. “Forget the wife.” She’s quiet for a moment, thinking. Quentin’s so glad she’s here. “There’s a lot of stories out there about love, about what it looks like and how it happens and what the rules are that make it real,” she says. “But love doesn’t always look like it does in the stories. And someone like you — you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. It’s not weird to me, that sometimes it might be bigger than the stories we tell.”

Quentin honestly almost points out that he doesn’t, because she knows Eliot. _That’s_ humiliating. She’s right about the big picture, though, he thinks. His heart — maybe it’s not always big the way he wants it to be, but it’s often held too much for what he thinks is allowed. But maybe that’s another thing he’s been wrong about. Maybe his heart is allowed — whatever fits inside it. Maybe it just is. “Thank you,” he says, and squeezes her hand.

Julia says, “Are you going to talk to him?”

“ _Eliot?_ ” Quentin says, looking at her askance. “Are you fucking kidding?”

She shrugs. “I mean, what’s your plan? Just like, pine after him until the end of days?”

“I’m not _pining_ ,” he says. She raises an eyebrow and he sits up to show he means it. “Really. I don’t get it, but — it doesn’t hurt, being in love with him. It just kind of — is.”

She purses her lips. “So what happens when he starts dating someone?”

Quentin shrugs. “Cross that bridge when I get to it?” She still looks dissatisfied. “Jules, I’m not — I’m really okay. I kind of — feel like I’m looking for the magic words here that will make you believe me, and I don’t know what those are, but — it’s true.”

She sits up to mirror him. “I’m sorry. I just — you know me. I worry. But you’re right. I should — I should trust you.”

“Look,” Quentin says, hesitant, “I know I’ve made that — hard.”

“Q,” she says, “you don’t need —”

“I mean, we both know I haven’t always filled you on, on — what’s going on with me,” he says. “Or — or been honest about it. But I’m — like, _really_ fucking trying not to lie to myself anymore, about — about what’s going on in my head. And I’m really going to try from now on not to — hide that shit from you, if — if it comes up. Like. I promise.”

“Okay,” she says quietly, with a small smile.

“So,” he says, feeling kind of more emotionally wrung out from that than from any of the shit in the mess of his love life, “ _Waiting for Guffman_ next?”

“You know it,” she says.

“Hey,” he says while she opens her laptop, “you wanna text Penny, see if him and Kady wanna pop over for dinner before he takes you back? We could go to a diner, I’m kinda feeling like a burger.”

“Yeah,” she says, “that sounds fun.”

She picks up her phone and sends the text and they settle in to watch the movie begin. Quentin is a little bit heartbroken and totally fucking in love with a best friend who’ll never love him like that again and he still kind of feels like this is already the best year of his life. That’s weird, no matter what Julia says, but there are worse things to be.

*

He does mope, a couple days, laying around the house or on the beach, letting his brain rot, just a little bit. He eats a lot of take-out, not bothering to cook; he listens to Leonard Cohen and feels sorry for himself. He and Luisa spend an afternoon getting stoned out of their minds and watching old-school viral videos until they’re laughing too hard to talk; Cynthia walks by while they’re shrieking _He’ll save children, but not the British children!_ back and forth at each other, shakes her head, and moves on.

He can’t quite bring himself to delete Serena’s number out of some probably deluded hope that they might wind up friendly, if not exactly friends, but he unfollows her everywhere, out of like, respect, and he — misses her. He does. Her teasing grin, the smell of her hair. It feels like he’s saying goodbye to all of these pieces of her one by one, sorry to let go but not sorry to have known them; not sorry to have tried. It’s weird to lament a break-up where he didn’t actually fuck anything up, but it’s — almost nice, in a way. To just sit with the sadness that it turns out they couldn’t ever in this lifetime have become what he hoped some nights they might be on their way to, without any accompanying bitterness or regret. Cohen says _I did my best, it wasn’t much_ , and maybe it wasn’t, but — it counted, Quentin thinks. If living means what you make it mean, then — it means something, that when he met her he wanted more than anything to have something real, and now he can look back and know that he did. Proof of concept: he did, which means he can, and one day he will again, and who knows? Maybe that one will be the one that lasts.

It should probably concern him more, given that he does want to find a long-time love, that for now his heart belongs to Eliot — belongs to him bodily, completely, expansively. Like his heart is a stone and Eliot is the sea he dropped it into. So total is his love that he can’t believe he didn’t see it brewing beneath, but then — that’s not the story he was expecting to tell. And maybe it should concern him, that he’s once again handed over his heart unasked for, that he’s in love as deep as he’s ever been and he doesn’t see any way out, but it just… doesn’t. There’s a little ache there of impossibility, but mostly — mostly Quentin feels like his love is his, whether or not Eliot wants it, and it’s good. It’s the best part of him; he can’t be mad, that it’s chosen this particular mark. It’s Eliot; what the hell was he supposed to do?

Eliot — god, _Eliot_. Eliot on the phone, fond and amused, wry and sincere, the eternal _muchness_ of that thrilling voice, its playful cadence and its sweet tones, spinning palace drama and menu-planning into a yarn out of folklore, telling him in sentences halting but unafraid about something soft and bruised that came up in therapy that day, calling bright and cheerful midweek because he met the mayor of the fauns and he wanted Quentin to know — forever. Quentin could listen to him talk forever. His curious questions about Quentin’s research, his earnest congratulations on Quentin’s unimpressive accomplishments, that big rolling laugh like a brook down the hills when he thinks something is really funny and how _glad_ he always sounds, to be laughing like that — every damn time Eliot opens his mouth it’s an act of love, and he doesn’t even know. And his face, his curling mouth, his soft shining eyes, that face that makes you feel — and Quentin knows it’s not just him, knows Eliot can’t fucking _stop_ finding people to pour his love into — like you’re the only one in the room. The line of his throat, his fucking _hair_ , his hands — his hands on Margo’s back, his hands on Quentin’s shoulder, his hands fixing Fen’s stray hair, his hands casting elegant and sure — his hands are like him: beautiful and capable, delicate and strong, graceful and expressive. Always moving, so alive. Always finding new ways to love.

And it feels like should hurt, turning over these memories and images that paint the contours of a desire that will never be fulfilled, but instead Quentin feels like a kid with a rock collection, excited to open the box and admire his secret treasures. It’s almost like he has a _crush_ on Eliot, which — on the one hand, yeah, that’s what it's called when you want someone, and on the other hand, it feels like an absurd way to describe being in love with someone you’ve spent fifty years creating a life with in another world and months rebuilding a friendship with in this one. But somewhere beyond the fucking two-hands binary, beyond the realm of _should_ and _sense_ and _allowed_ — Quentin has a crush on Eliot. A giddy, champagne-bubbles, stupid private smiles crush. And he’s kind of never really done that before. He’s never felt that — that full-body wanting, that crackling distraction, that lift like his heart is a hot-air balloon propelling him above the ground — without tangling himself into knots about all the hideous things he’d decided it meant about him, all the vicious stories that led back to the same barren site. But he’s trying to learn to live without the stories that feel safe but small, that kept him afraid and in pain. He’s trying to just — be, and read his story as it goes. And it turns out without them, it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt, to love someone good and true. His only wistful thought is that he wishes he could tell Eliot about this, to thank him, because — proof of concept, again: he doesn’t need to be scared of love. Not now, not ever again.

*

Now that Quentin knows — now that he can see the shape of his love for Eliot in full — Eliot’s name on his phone sends his insides fluttering — not like nerves, like fucking — butterflies in his goddamn stomach, what is he, sixteen? This is so stupid, Quentin thinks contentedly, smiling as he answers the call. “El, hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Eliot says. Friendly, open. Beautiful eyes bursting with some mischief. Quentin hugs his knees to his chest, feeling like he’s getting away with something. “Guess what?”

“Uh, Twenty-three and Fen hooked up,” says Quentin.

“ _Ew_ ,” Eliot says, disgusted, and Quentin laughs, picturing his face twisting in horror. “Can you _imagine_? That’s like if Taylor Swift back when she was still country hooked up with — well, John Mayer, I guess, so. Maybe not actually as bad as that. But — ew, ew, your brain is diseased.”

“Terminally,” Quentin agrees. “Okay, I give up.”

“So we had an emergency all-hands council meeting yesterday that lasted until like, _well_ past everyone’s fucking bedtimes with how long it took us to hammer out a set of logistics and back-up plans everyone could live with, but —” Dramatic pause; Quentin just loves him. “We now have an official deputy plan for when Margo and I are both off-world for an extended period of time.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, stomach flipping. “So — that means…”

“That means,” Eliot says, “that in exactly one week, we are gracing your fair city with our royal presence.”

“Shit, really?” A brief jolt of fear runs through him, at what it will be like now to see Eliot in all his flesh-and-blood glory, so close and so touchable but not like that. Then the moment passes, and Quentin’s fucking thrilled. “That rules, oh my god.”

“It really does,” says Eliot. “And not just for Bambi’s blood pressure. So — get excited. Think of all your favorite local spots. I was thinking maybe if Serena’s free, we could all get dinner, have a chance to get to know her a little better.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, suddenly awkward, “we — we broke up, actually.”

“Oh, no,” Eliot says, so honestly sad — it’s so sweet, because Eliot is sweet, but it’s sad, because Eliot shouldn’t be sad, like, ever. “I’m really sorry.”

“It’s okay — nothing, like, dramatic,” Quentin says, which feels like a weird private joke because Eliot would be so, like, _insulted_ to hear that someone being secretly in love with him didn’t qualify as high drama indeed. “Just — the timing wasn’t right, you know?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says softly. “Well, in that case — I’m even happier we’re coming. Who better than to provide all the distraction you need in your time of woe?”

“No one else,” Quentin says, and he doesn’t even care that Eliot’s not hearing it like he’s saying it, because the thing is it’s true both ways. “No one else at all.”

*

He goes to yoga that evening, and it’s as annoying as ever, and the most annoying part is that somewhere in the nine billionth Downward Dog — which Alana keeps calling a resting posture, _what?_ — it actually does feel like he’s — reuniting with his breath, or whatever the fuck. The last dregs of the past few aimless days wash out of him with the moving and the breathing, which he sucks at doing in any kind of tandem but it makes a difference, somehow, to try. To show up, and decide. Lying down in Corpse Pose for the last few minutes of silence Alana always gives them at the end, Quentin does feel kind of like he’s coming back to life again, a little. Like maybe it was never just the one time; like he’s been pulling himself from the dead over and over, using any handhold he can reach. After class is over he and Luisa go home and make green smoothies in the blender to toast their return to the world of responsible adulthood, and drinking it in the kitchen Quentin almost can’t believe what a relief it is to know that it’s right there waiting for him.

He emails Josh back and forth with ideas for the next iteration of the knife spell, trying not to freak out about the fact that if he reads between the lines he gets the sense Xanthis of the Fingerlings is getting itchy about how long it’s taking. The edits they’re suggesting are increasingly out there and Quentin veers wildly between thinking they’re strokes of genius and wondering if the two of them are losing their minds. Sometimes when his brain is fried from staring at occult bonsai root diagrams he takes a break to open his brainstorming document for illuminating experiments to try with the base spell in the patch in California; the new moon is coming up, and he needs to decide what he wants to try. Meanwhile, now that Luisa doesn’t have work to occupy her time, she wants to sketch out ideas for the best way to lay out the network Nico is building, so they go through the notes from his interviews with Penny looking for patterns, commonalities, categories that emerge when you put all these connections to magic side by side.

It’s kind of exhausting; it’s often frustrating; it’s a lot of fun. All this magic swirling in his brain, thoughts flowing like ambient he’s trying to channel for a spell, and in between Julia texts him a picture of the basilisk’s tooth they tracked down to pay the Baba Yaga, in between Alice texts him that she’s in town on unexpected library business and they get lunch and talk about what they’re working on, in between he reads Barbara Guest and browses the shelves at the library wondering what on earth Jane Chatwin might like to read. In between he remembers every few hours that soon he’ll be spending hours in this city looking at Eliot’s face, knowing everything he knows about himself now, and the thought fizzes in his chest like champagne. Quentin gets in bed at night feeling pleasantly worn out and remembers all the nights he’s spent tossing and turning because he couldn’t feel certain of anything except the nothingness in his center, and it kind of amazes him, how wrong he was. How all that space in him was real, but it wasn’t nothing; it was just waiting for him to fill it up.

*

He’s going through an eighteenth-century treatise, apparently quite radical in its day, on circumstantial particularities of objects imbued with magical properties by a granting source, in French which is not a language he reads without a hefty assist from Google Translate, feeling his brain start to melt out of his ears and wondering if he needs to take like a cognitive snow day, when from the opposite side of the dining table Rishi says, “Hey — could I ask a favor?” and Quentin thinks, _Oh, thank god_.

He shuts his laptop, maybe a little too eagerly. “Sure thing.”

“It’s kind of a big one,” Rishi says, “so —”

“Please,” Quentin says. “Anything that distracts me from this fucking knife, you’ll be doing _me_ a favor.”

“Okay,” says Rishi. “So — I’ve kind of plateaued, at the house. There’s been a ton of progress, and it honestly feels like full exorcism is just around the corner, but the past couple weeks, I’m just tracing the same steps over and over. I’ve tried a bunch of different techniques, and I’ve fucked with the Pool dimensions, and I think — I think it might help go back to a cooperative version of the spell. Not even because — like, I managed to rewrite it so that in terms of raw power, what I’m working with should be enough. But I think maybe I’m not — focused enough, anchoring and manipulating simultaneously. I think at this point what’s left is — I almost want to say _delicate_ enough that it needs — not so much power, but finesse. So —”

“Yeah,” says Quentin, “I can do that. No problem.”

Rishi takes a deep breath, like that’s a load off his shoulders. “I once again owe you my life,” he says. “Or at least, like, I don’t know, a fucking steak dinner or some shit.”

“You really don’t,” says Quentin, smiling. He wants to go back to the house in La Jolla, he realizes — that place dark by magic and made something else by effort and patience. Tragedy, time, and what comes after. He wants to see that unfolding, wants to be part of some unseen future — like any future, he figures. Like his own. “I’m looking forward to it.”

*

He comes home from a run and whoever’s turn it was to check the mail has dropped a thick yellow envelope on the desk in his room. Curiously he picks it up, feeling excitement jolt through him as he catches the university insignia in the corner and tears the package open: the _Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ , Vol. 39, Issue 1, Winter 2022. He goes to the table of contents and then flips to the page that has what he’s looking for:

**A case study in inanimate cultivation as alternative mending: Material and psycho-spatial considerations**

**__** _Quentin M. Coldwater_

Quentin stares at the words on the page — his words, for something he made — entranced by the elegance of seeing them in print, in a dignified serif font, bound in the same collection as pioneers and respected experts in the field. He did this. Whatever else will ever happen, this will always be his. Whoever else he’s been and whoever else he might become, he will always be Quentin M. Coldwater, the author of this work. He traces the letters of his name there with trembling fingers, marveling at their certain stillness, and he starts to cry, because he feels —

— thrilled to see it, his name on something only good, this final proof that it’s real because he wanted it and because he worked for it and because each time he gave up he somehow found it in himself to start anew —

— grateful, heart overpouring love, for all the names in his absurdly long acknowledgements, every single other person who made this possible just because they cared enough to help, for Josh’s guidance and Margo’s advice to call him and Alice’s books and Penny’s deliveries and Toni’s worm castings and Rishi’s readings and Julia’s edits, for Luisa’s good humor along the way and for Kady’s real talk keeping him alive long enough to manage it, for Eliot’s love that wove through the other life that created the seed that became his spell —

— sad, so fucking sad, that his name is in print and he’s a published researcher, a scholar in this small way, and he’ll never be able to show his dad, he’ll never call his dad excited and embarrassed and not even know that he should be ashamed to be embarrassed because nothing is forever and his dad will never hear the news and even though he knew it was coming still choke up with a voice full of gentle pride while Quentin tries to tell him it’s not that big a deal, his dad will never insist on getting a copy of an academic journal he’ll never read one word of to keep on his bookshelf where he can look at it and know his son’s done something good, and know his son’s okay —

— astonished because it _is_ a big deal, it feels now that he’s holding it in his hands like a huge fucking deal, like an actual dream come true and god, he knew he was pleased with himself for having pulled off something decent but he’s realizing only this moment how much he wanted this, how it feels like the manifestation of something he wanted before someone told him he should submit, before he fixed the coffee maker or even before he started working on it, shit, before he died —

— excited to take a picture and text it to everyone who matters, all those people in the section about who the author wishes to thank, to picture Julia’s grin and Eliot’s soft eyes when they see it, the way they’ll be happy but not surprised because they’ve always looked at him and seen the person who could do this —

— fucked up because it’s like a key has slid into a lock inside him he didn’t even know was there and he can see clear as magic that this was never just about the coffee maker, this was for the college student going cross-eyed writing about Ashbery in Butler and feeling his world shift in a way he was too afraid of himself to hold onto when someone told him this was something he could do, and before that the teenager writing terrible and borderline plagiaristic fantasy novels abandoned a few chapters in that no one ever knew existed but that he kept in a folder on his computer for years after he’d stopped working on them, and before that the little kid who followed every teacher’s every rule fastidiously but who always lingered coming back to the classroom alone at the bulletin board for the pleasure of seeing again some story or report laboriously rewritten in his crooked handwriting —

— hungry with how much he wants to do this again and powerful with how that doesn’t actually seem impossible —

— so stupid that he’s spent so long hating himself that he couldn’t ever let himself look head-on at something that should have been part of his life if only he’d let it, and so overwhelmed at all the ways he’s been wrong about himself and all the discoveries about his own heart still before him, and so relieved to have this one tangible at last, and so nervous about where it might lead him if he lets it and so scared he might be too afraid still to keep it bright —

— proud of himself and embarrassed to be and embarrassed about his embarrassment and exhausted with every way he is and how hard it is to learn any new ones —

— happy, a buoyant wordless happiness filling him like light, like air, so goddamn happy he feels he could split open with it —

— broken like he’s coming apart with all this _muchness_ inside him, broken like something shattered him once and his body will always remember how that felt, broken like he’s crackling with potential —

— _whole_ —

He stands there in his room, crying in his shorts and running shoes, hair still sticking to his face with sweat, looking at his words and at his name, Quentin Coldwater the guy who died but not just that anymore or maybe ever, sure that he’s never felt this much in his entire life, never let himself, never been so unafraid in the face of his own emotions, so sure he could survive his own sadness and so eager to welcome in his own joy, and that’s part of it too, that he can’t believe how much he’s changed, he can’t believe that he thought change was impossible and now it feels like all he ever does, and then —

— oh, _then_ —

He knows, the exact second it happens. So unmistakably it shocks him out of his tears, stunned with what’s happening and with the revelation of yet another thing he’d let himself get used to without even feeling what he was missing. It’s like he’d been encased in soundproof glass and the glass cracks open, and once it’s lying in glittering shards at his feet he can hear music playing, vibrant and beautiful, trilling playfully and swelling with elegant catharsis. Like diving into the ocean, submerged in something bracing and vast. Like stumbling out of a cave and into a rainforest, dazzling in its greens and reds and yellows and the thickness of the air and chirping birds and tiny flowers and creeping vines and the sense of _life_ , crowding everywhere. Or onto the beach, open and soft and inviting, the sparkling view of the sea gorgeous blue under the sky and the expanse of the horizon.

His magic — all of it. In his heart and in his soul, his body and his shade, his brain and his hands. Familiar and not quite the same as it was — its missing pieces filling in the new edges made by the magic he’s learned, the ways he’s worked to shift how he can use it, tangling with the castings that have become his, growing like flowers in the core of him, which is not how it used to be. Wilder, bigger, yet more controlled, more fully his own. Stronger — he feels that instantly. Charged with a sureness and flowing with a grace he’s never had.

Quentin doesn’t need to test it; it’s clear, so clear he can’t believe he ever thought he might not see it coming. But he takes his cracked phone out of his pocket anyway, to enjoy it — marveling at the way its brokenness lights up instantly for him, as soon as he turns its focus to it, exhilarated by how simple it is, barely casting at all, to stitch the screen back together, smooth and easy and — he can read this as soon as it’s done — less breakable than it was before. He laughs with the joy of it, then turns to his closet, feeling almost high with his own capacity except that he’s also never felt so himself. Quentin starts to walk over and stops, deciding instead with a grin he can’t tamp down to just — there — throw the doors open from here, with what feels like the suggestion of a spell; to bring the ziploc bags of broken plates to him, less like levitating them and more like he can find an invisible rope to tug them over gently, easy, so easy, and repair them one by one, using a different style or variant on each, delighted with his stack of mended objects at the end — so delighted that he takes one and hurls it to the ground to smash it just so he can fix it again, laughing at himself all the while.

Quentin can’t believe he ever thought life held nothing ahead for him that felt better than death — can’t believe he ever thought magic came from pain. Because this is life — it feels so obvious now — his magic shaped irrevocably by pain, yes, carrying its mark always, but changed by everything else, too. Life itself coursing through him, sweet and dangerous and fluid and bright and good, so good. His, his, his.

*

Saturday after his post-run shower he finds a text from Eliot to meet him and Margo — this is a surprise — at the boardwalk on Mission Beach. He gets dressed quickly, letting himself enjoy the thrum of anticipation in his chest, his heart beating _Eliot, Eliot, Eliot_ , like a song, the excitement of being so close to Eliot’s face and the gentle sweetness thinking of the day lying ahead of him, the three of them stepping out of the lives they’ve worked so hard for and appreciating a chance to just be. On the short bike ride around the bay he listens to New Order, those guitars that float glistening like stars or mist, the songs that sound like living after you’ve had to survive, like tragedy plus time — _no looking back now, we’re pushing through_ …

After he locks up his bike he sets off on foot to find Eliot and Margo. When he finally spots them, laughing in each other’s faces and each holding a cartoonishly large cone of bright pink cotton candy, he stops for a moment, feeling for just a second like the kid they let in at Brakebills all those years ago, glowing with their reflected brightness — like that but better, because he doesn’t feel now like they might be his long awaited escape route out of his own life. Looking at them now feels like being more himself. Like coming home.

Also Eliot is wearing shorts and Quentin wants to lick his legs like candy canes. It should hurt, he thinks, astounded still, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To just — want.

They catch him staring and wave him over with their big gleaming smiles and Quentin hustles to their sides, wraps Margo up so tight she laughs in surprise, throws his arms around Eliot trying not to shiver at how good it is to smell him through his clothes. Then he steps back and says, “What the fuck are you guys wearing?”

They are dressed with baffling normalcy. Eliot’s in fucking denim cut-offs, under a plain black tank top which shows off his lovely shoulders; Margo’s wearing jean shorts and a pink — crop top? What? They are both in _flip-flops?_

Margo narrows her eyes. “Are you expecting us to take fashion advice from a guy in a novelty tank that says _sun of a beach_?”

“I mean you guys look great,” Quentin says, “you’d look good in a garbage bag —”

“We’d look _great_ in garbage bags,” says Margo.

“It would be art,” says Eliot.

“— but like,” says Quentin, “I just thought your usual vibe these days was more, like, Let’s Scare The Locals.”

“That’s what _I_ said,” Eliot says, trying to look very put upon but smiling down at Margo too fondly to manage it. “But Bambi wanted to roleplay normies. Kinky bitch.” He reaches an arm around her back to pull her up against him.

“Hey,” says Margo, “variety is the spice of life. Everyone needs a break from their dream job, and being myself just so happens to be mine.” She smirks. “Plus, it’s just for a day or two — our other outfits will have them quaking in their boots. Did you eat? We’ve been subsisting on sugar and air all morning, and I think Eliot’s about to get cranky.”

“I do not get _cranky_ ,” Eliot says, which is a lie, he totally does. “Here, open up.”

Quentin obediently opens his mouth so Eliot can land a soft sweet cloud on his tongue while Margo stage-whispers, “Snacky bitch.”

“I’m actually starving,” Quentin says once it dissolves in his mouth, “you guys want tacos?”

They go to Ray’s favorite taco place and spread out on bright neon beach towels afterwards to lie in the sun and relax. Quentin remembers with a jolt following this same path with Julia the day he told her he was staying here, back when he had no idea yet he was saving his own life. Before he knew he could or even that he wanted to. He was so tired then, and so afraid. Now there isn’t anyone in the water and the beach is less crowded and Quentin is glad to be alive. Eliot and Margo find plenty of fodder for people watching along the boardwalk, keeping a running commentary on likely psychological hang-ups and hidden sexual proclivities based mostly on evidence such as _only perverts wear that much orange_ and _a man who wears his pants so high is a man with something to hide_ , and Quentin feels lucky to listen in on their silly game, to see their private softness with each other, easier and livelier now that everyone’s a little older, a little more calm. They’re growing up, Quentin thinks, all of them, and he feels glad for all of it, to do it and to watch it in the wonderful people he loves.

They’ve been out there for what must be hours, lazing in the sunlight and Margo’s gentle cryo bubble keeping them just slightly warmer than the January chill, laughing constantly and saying basically nothing, when her phone buzzes and she smirks at the screen, typing some reply. “Alright, boys,” she says, a lascivious smile spreading across her face, “I’m taking a little detour on operation fun in the sun. Mama’s gonna go fuck a surfer. Meet you back for dinner — be good while I’m gone.” She stands and, with a peck on Eliot’s lips and a ruffle of Quentin’s hair, sets off across the beach, walking despite her best efforts exactly like the king she is.

Quentin’s alone with Eliot. His stomach, his skin, his nerves take a moment to do a funny little dance about this, not unpleasant. It feels like a secret, like something he’s getting away with, and it feels like something a little bit sexy, and it feels like getting to hang out with his friend. “Good trip so far?”

“The dream,” Eliot says, lashes fluttering gorgeously. “And _so_ overdue. We got in at noon yesterday and ordered take-out and just did _nothing_ until we passed out at like ten and slept for I swear to god twelve hours straight.”

“Sounds pretty ideal,” Quentin says, picturing it: Margo and Eliot lying on each other, without having to be anything for anyone else.

“It was,” Eliot says. He smiles softly. “It’s funny — that’s what I used to think I wanted my life to be like, minus the early bedtime. Just — me and Margo and no one else and nothing else, no one who wanted anything from me, nothing I had to feel responsible for, no one I could let down. I thought I was going to live my whole life waiting for those pockets of nothing. And now it feels better than it ever used to be — because I know there’s all this other shit waiting for me when I get back. And not all of it is fun, and some of it is a real pain in my ass — some time when I’m not in vacation mode remind me to tell you about the situation with the beavers and their sticks, which is unfortunately not nearly as sexual as it sounds — but it’s… I don’t know. My life, I guess. And I basically — like it.” He shakes himself a little. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“No,” Quentin says, “but I know what you mean.”

Eliot looks over at him. “What about you? You seem like you’re doing really well, lately.”

“I think I might be,” Quentin says. “I — oh, actually, that reminds me —” He opens up his messenger bag for his copy of _Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ , feeling like a dweeb but too excited to mind. He’d texted a picture to everyone else he wanted to tell, but knowing Eliot was coming soon he’d saved this one to do in person. “I wanted to show you.” Quentin finds his article and hands it over to Eliot so he can see.

“Holy shit, Q,” Eliot says, smiling like the dawn even though the fact of it doesn’t actually convey new information.

Quentin rakes his hair back, uncomfortable and pleased. He’s expecting Eliot to hand it back with congratulations, but Eliot peers at it like he’s actually reading it, which is _super_ embarrassing, but also very nice. Quentin tries not to blatantly stare at his profile and his curls falling into his face as he reads. It doesn’t go well.

“I like this,” Eliot says, pointing to a paragraph at the end of the introduction. “The thing about — identifying essence with action, instead of assuming some kind of permanence of form — that’s really good.” He gives it back then, thankfully. “This is so exciting.”

Quentin slides the periodical back into his back and shrugs, not totally sure how to handle this attention now that he has it. But like, it is, right? “Yeah. Thanks.” He considers the section Eliot highlighted, thinking about how months ago he’d suggested in writing that what you do is what defines you — how many times has he had to learn that lesson? He hopes by now it’s started to stick. “You were right,” he says. “About — what you said, like, ages ago, right after I moved here. I don’t know if you remember, but — you told me that story, about when you were possessed, how you had to — look at the worst of yourself, and see that you actually had a choice, about how to be — god. I thought I was so fucking clear by then about — the worst of me, and all the ways I’d done it on purpose, but…” He shakes his head, throat tightening a little not because he’s sad but just because — it’s been so hard. “I don’t know. That second part, going from _I did this_ to _I could have done better_ — that part’s really fucking hard.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says. He places a hand on Quentin’s, warm.

“And it’s weird,” he goes on, “because — it should be good news, right? That you can — do better, be better. It should — feel good, to believe that. And I think — it does now, for me. But — it’s taken so fucking long to get there.”

“I think,” Eliot says, “when you’ve kind of — trained yourself out of wanting things, or out of seeing the things you want — I think anything that makes them more real is scary, because if you want things you can get hurt.”

“But you get hurt anyway,” Quentin says.

“Yeah,” says Eliot, “and that’s why — I mean, obviously that doesn’t actually _work_. But — I don’t know, it’s different, right? To — own it, and accept it, instead of just kind of always saying, well, maybe this time I’ve — run away hard enough that it won’t be an issue anymore.”

“It is different.” Quentin looks at the waves, their white ends on the dark sand. Always collapsing and always rising. Coming back and back and back.

“You never did tell me — how you got out of the happy place. I mean like, what your memory was.” Quentin bites his lip, wondering if he’s overstepped. He didn’t think before he asked — he just wants Eliot, as much of him as he can have. His beauty and every ugly piece he’s working to outgrow. “Sorry — you don’t have to, obviously. I just — you said you thought you should tell me, so. But only if you want.”

Eliot smiles, kind of wry. “I guess I can tell you now,” he says, almost to himself. Eyes on the ocean he says, “It was — you, Q. The day we remembered. The throne room at Whitespire, when you said — what if we gave it a shot?”

A twinge runs through Quentin’s chest. That one — stings a bit. He wasn’t expecting that. “Wow,” he says, hoping it comes out light. “That bad, huh?”

Eliot shakes his head. “No — the opposite, actually. It wasn’t what you said; it was what I did. You offered me something real, and I — chickened out. I told myself I was being smart, or objective, or practical, or whatever, but that was bullshit. That was all bullshit. I was just scared. Because it had been so good I couldn’t really believe it, and I definitely couldn’t believe that I could — have that again, and not fuck it up. Scared like — like I said, of letting what I wanted feel real, even for a second. So I shut the damn door and you got caught in it, and there was nothing I wanted to admit less than that I’d fucked that up, and nothing I wished more than that I could — get a do-over, and say yes this time.” He smiles crookedly at Quentin. “Sorry — have I made it weird?”

“No,” Quentin says without thinking, because — he hasn’t, actually. Quentin feels like whatever he and Eliot have been to each other, where they are now is a place neither of them can fuck up that easy. And that’s — not as bad as he thought, when he first heard it. Because, thinking back to that day — like, he knew, right? He knew Eliot; it’s so obvious in retrospect that this was one of his moves. If Quentin had just pushed through the hurt and the humiliation to see — but he couldn’t. It matched too well the story about himself he knew. “You know what I wish I’d said?”

Curiously, Eliot says, “No, what?”

Quentin smiles. “I wish I’d said — hey, El, maybe I wasn’t clear. Fifty years is nice and all, but, uh, I am fucking crazy about you right here, right now, and if it took me remembering a life that never happened to figure that out, that’s only because, well, I’m fucking stupid sometimes. Which you goddamn know, so — forget fifty years. Forget proof of concept. Do you want me or not? And I wish I’d said — yeah, no _shit_ that’s not our real lives. I am actually very aware that I am telling you I want something different from what we had when we were trapped in a shack in the woods with the son who doesn’t exist and the wife who died before I was born. But whatever it is, whatever _us_ looks like _here_ — I want it. I wish I’d said that — that it wasn’t about a safe bet or a sure thing, it wasn’t about the future at all. It was about fucking wanting you. And I wish,” he continues, feeling like maybe he should tamp it down but too wound up now with all the words he wishes he could have found to stop, “I wish I’d said, you know what, fifty years of emotion _is_ a lot to process, so — okay, sure. When do you want to revisit this topic? Tomorrow? In three days? A week from now? Because if you need that time, to figure out how _you_ feel, or because you want to give me a chance to back out — if that’s what it takes for you to believe in this, that’s fine. I can wait. But let’s put that in our fucking calendars, because I promise you, however long you want me to wait, when you’re ready, I’m going to be asking you the same question, and I’m going to want the same answer. Because I was really in love with you then, El. And I knew — I should have fucking known you were in love with me.”

Eliot’s smiling at him, wistful. “Sadly — I’m honestly not sure that would have made a difference to me. I was so fucking — caught up in my own shit I couldn’t even see it, you know?”

“I do know,” Quentin says. “And that — sucks, for you, but honestly I wasn’t even thinking of that. I was thinking — it would have made a difference to me. To know that I’d — fucking fought for it. For us, for me, for what I’d wanted, for — living a life where it wasn’t just my fear and my issues and my fucking self-loathing making all the calls.”

“I feel that,” Eliot says. “I really fucking feel that. But —” His throat works, just a second. “I don’t know, maybe this is naive, or whatever, but — I guess there’s a part of me that feels like, even if we couldn’t figure it out — then, for that — I think we’re both living that kind of life now, right? That — better, braver life. And the idea that we got to be part of that, for each other, even if it wasn’t how we would have wanted, once — it’s sort of beautiful, to me.”

Quentin’s heart tilts. “It really is.” Eliot’s right, even if maybe it’s a little more bittersweet for Quentin to think it — that in the end they saved each other, they changed each other, they love each other now. Everything that really counts, it’s all still theirs. Almost everything he wants, he’s already got. He’s so lucky.

And yet — his stomach flips — and yet, and yet. And yet he wants more. And it doesn’t make any sense to think he could get it. Eliot should be done with that part of his life, forever; Quentin should have driven that final nail in the coffin enough times by now to stick. The story where the two of them have one more turn yet waiting doesn’t make sense but — his pulse is picking up, just a little — but his brain is fucking broken, and he’s working on fixing it but in the meantime he’s got a lifetime behind him of believing there’s no story where he gets to be himself and be happy at the same time. There’s no story where Quentin Coldwater, the person he actually is, gets a happy ending. Except — except he kind of has his happy ending now, doesn’t he? He has a life that feels better than dying and good things to do and people who love him he’s learning how to love right. He didn’t think any of that was possible, and he was fucking wrong on every count. So — so maybe this — it doesn’t make sense but the stories that make sense to him are the stories that write him out or make him unreal, that end in tragedy or glory but never in his own skin, and he’s trying to live something true so maybe just for that, he has to know —

Quentin asks, “Have I blown it?”

Eliot goes very still. Carefully, so carefully you’d have to know him as well as Quentin does to know he’s doing it, he says, “What do you mean, blown it?”

“I mean exactly what you think I mean,” Quentin says. Eliot’s eyes darken, like he doesn’t know if he should trust where Quentin’s going. “I mean that I’m in love with you, and if it’s too late for that to matter to you anymore, like — I fucking get it, honestly. Part of me feels like the answer should be yes, I have blown it, like maybe your therapist would be kind of mad at you for saying anything else after the shit I’ve pulled, so — I won’t be upset, or anything, and I — I really am doing great, I’m not going to set off on another cross-country nervous breakdown, either, like it’s — fine, whatever you feel is fine, but — I don’t know, El, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the ways I’ve talked myself into running away or fucking up the best things I have, all these bullshit stories that have ruled my life and how hard it’s been to get away from that and how fucking _good_ it feels to just — _be_ , twenty-eight years in, when I can manage it, and I — I had to ask. I just had to — know that I wasn’t doing that again, wasn’t just — making up this story in my head about how I fuck things up and I’m not enough and no one wants me, and like — I have fucked things up, and it’s okay if you don’t want me like that, but — I just had to know.”

Eliot’s looking down at the ground for a long time. Quentin watches him take this in and reaches into himself like he reaches into magic, looking for — for anything, any fear or dismay, and he finds that it’s not there. It’ll hurt, if Eliot doesn’t want him; if this really is something good he fucked up too bad to get back. But they’ll be okay, he knows. He’ll be okay. He’ll keep on living, because he wants to. Exactly that easy, and exactly that hard. And he’ll have this with him, always — he’ll know that he saw a chance to be fucking real, and he took it with both hands.

Eliot lifts his face, and his eyes are filled with fear. It’s a fear Quentin knows, in Eliot and in himself: the fear of hope, the fear of the good things that promise only to vanish like smoke. He knows he wasn’t the person who put it there, but he hates that he ever did anything to bind it tighter. If Eliot will let him, he’ll spend his whole life working to smooth it out.

“You haven’t blown it,” Eliot says finally, an ache in his voice like he’s afraid saying it will make it break. Quentin feels like the occasion calls for dignity but he can’t hold back the grin that explodes onto his face. “But — I do sort of feel like at this point I’m entitled to make you work for it, like, a little.”

“Yeah,” Quentin agrees, ebullient, because Eliot is entitled to absolutely anything he wants on this whole stupid Earth, “that’s fair — more than fair, I think your therapist would be very proud, actually — so, okay, here goes —” He stands up, because he feels like he should, then feels stupid looking down at Eliot from there and sinks down to one knee, which if anything is more absurd, perched like this eye-level with Eliot sitting on the fucking beach towel still. “I don’t know why this felt right — I’m not, like, asking you to marry me — although I would,” he says, and he can see Eliot starting to smile, “if that’s what you wanted — and don’t give me any of that bullshit about how you’re not the marrying kind, okay, like yeah, it _is_ a patriarchal institution that’s totally ideologically opposed to everything you stand for, but, also, you can’t tell me you don’t want to fucking — wear your best outfit and kiss your true love in front of all your friends before eating a specialty menu you designed, come on, El — and _me_ , I’d marry you today at City Hall, but then you wouldn’t be able to force me to take dance lessons, or get fitted for an actual tux, so — I guess I could still propose now, but honestly, I feel like if you give me some time I might actually be able to come up with something like, romantic and shit, make it really memorable — maybe get Margo in on the planning, so I don’t fuck up the like, _aesthetics_ — wow, I am — _not_ off to a good start, let’s try this again.” Eliot laughs. It’s the best thing Quentin’s ever heard.

He takes a deep breath, considering how to order the galaxy of thoughts in his head. “So — I’m in love with you,” he says. Eliot’s eyes go misty. Good. “I said that already, but I wanted to say it again because — first of all, it’s super fun, and, to kind of continue from an earlier theme, I’m trying this new thing where I do what I fucking want, but also — I have like, other stuff to say, that might not seem totally related at first, so I just wanted to set that, like, context, okay? Like, pretend that I’m saying that every other sentence, just — me babbling, and then, boom, I’m in love with you. But I’m skipping the second part, because I have a lot to say.”

“Clearly,” Eliot murmurs, looking amused and so, so fond.

“It’s funny because — there’s a story you kind of expect to go here, right?” says Quentin. “Boy meets boy, boy loses boy, boy and boy figure their shit out and get back together, which was like, the point all along. And in that story, there’s like, certain connotations, or assumptions, or whatever. Like, a part of me feels like I should be kneeling here telling you about how I was — running from my feelings, this whole time, and I was too hurt and too afraid to see that I still loved you, no matter what, and now that I’ve, like, healed and grown and changed and shit, I can finally recognize that actually, my feelings for you never went away. All along, it’s been you. You — complete me, or whatever. And that’s — I don’t know, it’s not the worst story. But, uh —” He laughs a little. “That’s actually not what’s happening here.”

Eliot raises an eyebrow. Quentin loves his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“No,” Quentin says. “See, like — and I’m not saying this to make you feel bad, so just — don’t, okay, but it’s like, important backstory, so, um — you broke my heart. That was real, and it hurt a ton, although it honestly took me like, ages to figure that out, because that’s how fucked up I am, that I couldn’t put two and two together and see that getting dumped by someone you lived with for fifty years might feel kind of shitty. No, see —” Eliot’s face is wilting a little. “Stop that, just — let me finish, okay? So that hurt, and I had to like cry about _Titanic_ about it and whatever —”

“You hate that movie,” Eliot says.

“Stop interrupting me, I’m giving you a very romantic speech,” Quentin says. “It — the technical achievement is admittedly undeniable, and — whatever, that’s not the point. The point is — I got over it. For real. I moved the fuck on. And it hurt, and then it felt, like, amazing, actually, to be able to — let that go. And then — then we started talking again, and things started off sort of weird, but we fixed that, and then — then we were _friends_ again, and, Eliot, that felt incredible. That felt so, so good, to have my friend Eliot back. Because my friend Eliot is — he’s funny and he’s smart and he’s sweet and he’s like the kindest person I’ve ever met and he just — he always makes me feel good, whenever he’s around. Without even trying, although I think he actually also tries really hard, which is part of what makes him so awesome.”

“He sounds pretty great,” Eliot says, a little choked up. “So great I’m not sure I know this guy, actually.”

“I’m not engaging with that,” Quentin says, “save it for your therapist.” Then, feeling bad, he says, “Or, I mean, we can talk about it later, but — I’m trying to stay focused here. So. Um. What happened was — I had this great friend Eliot, and I kept hanging out with my friend Eliot, and talking to my friend Eliot, and what happened then was —” Quentin grins. “I fell in love with him. All over again. Like, real bad, stars in my fucking eyes, head over heels love, because — because how could I not, Eliot? How could I not fall in love with you, in this life, in any life, no matter where we are? And obviously, you know, fifty years, Fillory, that’s part of who we are, forever, and it’s — that’s a good story too, right? Like, it’s kind of epic, honestly —”

“Spanning years and continents,” Eliot says. “Lives ruined, blood shed.”

“You finally watched _Veronica Mars_ without me?” Quentin demands.

“Julia got Margo into it,” Eliot protests, “I was coerced.”

“Traitor — okay, I’m getting distracted again.” Quentin shakes himself, trying to remember where he was. “That story is epic, but — I’m so fucking crazy about you, Eliot, and when I think about that, which I’ve been doing like, constantly, I mean I’ve got it _bad_ — I don’t think about that. I think about — about _you_ , just being the way you are, and how it feels to have you in my life. This life, that I’m living right now.” Quentin takes a moment to just — hold that, the fullness of his life and the joy of Eliot in it.

“You know,” he says, “you told me, that day at Whitespire — I said what I said, right, and you told me that wasn’t me. Don’t feel bad, that’s not what this is about. Because, um — you were being a dick, but you were also kind of right. That guy in the throne room, that fucking — mess and a half who was so desperate for his life to mean something he was ready to hand it over to someone else’s quest because a story in a book told him he should — that wasn’t the person I became in Fillory, with you. And that really freaked me out, honestly, because I thought — I thought maybe that was my only shot, you know? I thought maybe, that person who was — okay, or — fuck it, better than okay — who was so much happier than I ever thought I could be, so fucking full of love and joy — I thought maybe you had made me into that person, and without you I was fucking screwed, because I was just — me.” Quentin swallows, remembering the hugeness of that fear.

“But,” he goes on, smiling, “I told _you_ once, when things were real bad, that I didn’t need you. And I was being a dick, and I’m sorry for basically everything I said to you back then, but — I was also kind of right. Because it turned out I didn’t need you, to become — not, like, a new person, but — myself, but better. To be — okay, and happy, and pretty full of love and joy, actually, like, more all the time, so much I sort of can’t believe it some days. I can’t believe how okay it feels, getting out of bed in the fucking morning. I can’t believe that I’m — not the person I was in Fillory, but not the guy in the throne room either — I’m, I’m a fuck-up and a mess and also this person who is fucking on one knee on a _beach_ in _Southern California_ wearing _shorts_ in _public_ delivering this like gigantic monologue where I confess my love. But, like, I am. And — you were a part of that, everyone in my whole stupid life was a part of that, but — I didn’t need you like I thought I did, to get here. And I don’t need you to stay here. I just —” He laughs, thrilled to be saying it. “I just want you, El. I just want you so, so bad.”

“Because — I can’t even begin to imagine what would be enough to put it into words..” He shakes his head, amazed. “Because you’re — spectacular, Eliot, you really are. Because I can talk to you forever, I want to talk to you all the time, because you’re — funny and smart and interesting and weird and just — so yourself, all the time, in this way that’s really fun but that also makes it easier, to be me. You are — I mean, yes, fine, _insanely_ good at sex, but that almost feels beside the point — I mean it’s not beside the point — but, well, kind of! Like, yes, it’s a nice — bonus that you are stupidly, stupidly attractive, just — obscenely, offensively hot, honestly, and, yeah” — he rolls his eyes at Eliot’s impending smirk — “you have a giant dick, but mostly — mostly you’re good in bed for the same reasons you’re a good — friend and host and person and, I mean, yeah, fucking — boyfriend, or partner, or husband, or whatever word you want to use. You’re sweet and you’re considerate and you’re generous and you’re — _very_ creative — and you really listen, because you really care. And I don’t — I don’t know if you know what that does to the people around you. Just the way you teach people how to — feel safe. You make me feel so safe. And so — good. And I’m not —” He’s choking up now, voice rough. “I’m not a person who has a lot of experience with feeling those ways. I’m getting the hang of it, but — you give me so much, just by existing, just by letting me into your life. And you’re good, El, you’re so good. You’re good and real and you have this gigantic heart that just won’t stop opening up for the world even though you know exactly how shitty the world can be. And like — I was so fucked up for a while, I wanted to cut out my own heart, because I couldn’t stand having one. And I almost fucking succeeded, and it almost ruined my life, and it has been — the hardest thing I’ve ever done, deciding not to do that anymore. But you — Jesus, El, everything you’ve lived through before that, and you’re still so — alive, to all of it. That’s so — so brave, and I hope… I hope that’s something I can learn from you, too. How to be brave like that, and keep — my heart big, and open, even when it’s hard.” Quentin reviews what he’s said. He feels like he’s hit all the major points. “Okay. How am I doing?”

“Pretty good,” Eliot says, wiping a tear away. “Except for the part where I still think you might have gotten me confused with someone else.”

Quentin shakes his head firmly. “Nuh-uh, no way, man.” He sits back down on the towel. “Talk to your therapist about that shit, because — ask anyone who really knows you, El. They know I’m right.”

“Man?” Eliot says skeptically. “It’s your big true love confession speech, and you’re calling me man?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “I am who I am.” He throws his arms out. Today that feels pretty okay. “Take it or leave it.”

And eyes shining, Eliot finally says — “I’ll take it. Q, I’ll take all of it.”

Which Quentin knew, but it still nearly undoes him, to hear Eliot say it.

Slowly, like some part of him is unconvinced he’s not dreaming, Eliot brings a hand to Quentin’s cheek, slides it back to cradle his neck. Looking at Quentin’s face like he’s some miracle Eliot’s never seen before. Softly he says, “I love you.”

Quentin can’t speak. He’s so lucky. He’s so in love.

Eliot moves in to kiss him.

And Quentin wants that, so much that his whole body wakes up just at Eliot’s intention, but in the last second a thought occurs to him. “Wait.”

Eliot stops, an inch from his mouth, and looks up at his eyes, skeptical. “I’m getting mixed messages, here.”

Quentin shakes head. “Not mixed, we’re basically married now, it’s all good, just, um — can you like, do something normal, like check Instagram or whatever, for a sec?”

“I… _could_ ,” Eliot says, although he’s already sitting back and reaching for his phone.

“I just — I just have to do something,” Quentin says, taking out his own phone, to really set the scene. “Something I should have done a long time ago. Trust me?” He bites his lip. That feels like a lot to ask, still, after everything he’s done.

But Eliot shrugs, amiably resigned, and starts scrolling on his screen.

Quentin doesn’t actually have anything he wants to do on his phone. He opens up 2048 to kill the time, because he’s impatient, too, but he wants to do this right; after one disastrously short game and one decently long one, he figures that’s enough of that and shuts the screen off. “Hey, El?”

Eliot looks up at him, curious and amused. “What’s up?”

“Do you want to go on a date with me?”

The smile that spreads on Eliot’s face, sweet and surprised, almost amazed — it’s worth the fucking wait, that’s for sure. “I would love that.”

“Okay, good,” Quentin says. “So send me the address of the place you’re staying at, I’ll pick you up at — six-ish, maybe earlier or later, it’ll kind of depend on if I can get someone to loan me a car.”

“You’re picking me up?” Eliot says, still smiling.

“Yeah, I told you, it’s a date,” Quentin says. “A good one. Actually —” He stands up. “I have to go, I have things to do before I can take you out.” The words send little bubbles of joy through him. “But — I’ll see you at six. Or — near six. Oh, and — dress nice, okay? None of —” He gestures at Eliot’s outfit. “This. We’re gonna go somewhere fucking respectable.”

Eliot raises an eyebrow. “You’re giving _me_ wardrobe instructions?”

“Yes, I am, try to keep up,” Quentin says. “Okay, so — enough small talk, I gotta run,” he says, stepping back off the towel, trying not to trip over himself in excitement. “I have a date tonight.”

*

Quentin finds and unracks his bike, but he doesn’t go home. Instead he does some quick Googling to locate what he needs, then sets his destination and hurries to La Jolla as fast as he can safely go. When he arrives he spends a few minutes trying to find wifi before giving up and working a hotspot spell he knows. It doesn’t last long, but it should get him through what he needs. Once it’s operational, he FaceTimes Julia.

“Q,” she says. “What’s up?”

“I have a date,” he says, too excited to play coy. “With Eliot. Like, my Eliot. That Eliot. The one you know.”

“Oh my god,” she says, shocked and delighted — which, same — “ _what?_ ”

“Yeah,” he says, opening the door of the intimidatingly upscale shop Google led him to, “wanna help me pick out shoes?”

After an efficient trip following her guidance, he walks out of the store with a pair of simple black leather boots that are probably the nicest shoes he’s ever owned. They switch to texting as she steers him through a series of shops and options and like, _concepts_ until he’s heading home, finally, stabilizing his bags on his bike handles with magic, armed with an entire, like, _outfit_ : close-fitting black jeans, white dress shirt, simple black belt, something deceptively called a sports coat, which is neither sporty nor a coat, and which is apparently not the same as a suit jacket even though he can’t really tell the difference. Part of him feels kind of stupid, for putting so much effort into something that doesn’t matter, for doing something that is unmistakably fucking vain. But a bigger part of him wants to see Eliot’s face when Quentin shows up at his door dressed like someone who gives a shit — wants that enough that he’s starting to think, shit, maybe he kind of does.

In the house on the bay, he secures a car for the evening courtesy of Rishi, who looks honestly grateful for the chance to do Quentin a favor in return for his promise of ghost-assistance. Then he knocks on Luisa’s open door. “Hey — can I borrow your beach towel? The one with the minimizing charm on it?”

“Sure,” she says, looking up from her laptop. “Heading out?”

“Not yet,” he says. “I have a date tonight. With Eliot.” _God_ that’s fun to say.

Her eyes go wide. “Congratulations? Right? This is good news?”

“Extremely good,” he says, nodding happily.

She frowns. “Wait — are you gonna have sex on my towel?”

“I —” Quentin starts to deny it, but then he thinks about the reality of the situation, and, well — “It’s not, like, the _plan?_ But if that’s a dealbreaker, then — then maybe keep it.”

She purses her lips, looking torn. With a sigh she goes to her shelves and picks up the towel, rolled up usefully pocket-sized. “You know what, just — run every cleaning spell you know on it twice, and don’t tell me.”

“You sure?” Quentin says, even as he’s taking it from her.

“Yeah, you know me,” she says, “I’m a fucking sucker for true love.”

“You’re the best,” he says, hugging her tight.

“I know,” she says, patting him on the back. “But seriously, don’t tell me what you do on it. I do not want to know.”

He gives her an impulsive kiss on the cheek in gratitude and heads back to his room. He doesn’t get dressed yet, though. He grabs one of the plates still stacked on his desk and tuts his way through a locator charm, hoping the new specificity of his casting will compensate for the fact that he’s missing the relevant materials. Then he runs to the beach out back, all the way down the sand to the edge of the water. He has one more favor to ask.

*

Quentin picks up Eliot for their first date at the door of the apartment he and Margo are renting some miles around the bay on the beach. Eliot looks predictably devastating, black slacks outlining his impossibly long legs, simple vest over a dark shirt, subtly patterned, hair curling gorgeously around his beautiful face. He’s wearing a watch; why is that hot? “Hello there.”

Quentin can see Eliot taking him in, and he tries to remain still, swallowing his discomfort instead of fidgeting under his gaze. He wanted this, he remembers; and if he makes himself just — stay with it, he can see that he likes it, as embarrassing as that might be. He likes that Eliot looks surprised, and a little turned on, and kind of impressed; he likes that before he left the house, he checked himself in the mirror and thought he looked pretty damn good, and Eliot clearly agrees. “Hi,” he says out loud. “Are you ready to go?”

Margo appears at Eliot’s side, arms folded, oddly parental. “Now, boys,” she says. “Remember to behave yourselves. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“As if that narrows it down,” Eliot says, stooping to kiss her forehead.

Margo meets Quentin’s eyes, gives him a smile that makes him feel warm. “Drive safe. You’re carrying precious cargo.”

“I know,” he says, and kisses her cheek before they head out.

The restaurant comes at Cynthia’s recommendation, because she likes classy shit. It’s some New American place, whatever that means, where the tables have candles and the menus don’t have any decimal points and the waiters are all as well-dressed as he is. Eliot keeps glancing around kind of bewildered, which is funny because he likes this kind of place way more than Quentin does. Quentin’s not sure if he’s surprised Quentin picked it, or if some part of him can’t quite process the fact that he’s been brought here, instead of just going. That seems like something Eliot would have trouble with — the idea that someone else might want to give him nice things, instead of always the other way around. Well. Quentin’s going to make sure he gets fucking used to it.

The waiter asks if they want drinks, and the cocktail menu honestly looks pretty appealing, but Quentin says no, and Eliot follows suit. When the waiter’s gone, Quentin looks Eliot right in the eye and says, “I want to remember this night perfectly.”

Eliot smiles. “Me too.”

“So,” Quentin says, “Eliot, right? Tell me about yourself. What do you do?”

Eliot’s smile broadens. “So my job is kind of unusual,” he says. “I work at — have you heard of Fillory?”

“Oh, like the children’s books, right?” says Quentin. “Yeah, I read those when I was a kid. You’re in publishing?”

“Sometimes I wish,” says Eliot. “But no — I work in actual Fillory.”

“No way,” say Quentin. “Like, the actual magic kingdom?”

“Yes,” says Eliot. “Although these days the kingship is democratically elected, and the title is mostly a matter of tradition. That’s who I work for, actually — High King Margo the Destroyer.”

“Sounds like a tough boss.”

“She’s a sweetheart once you get to know her,” Eliot says. “If she likes you. And she likes me best of all.”

“So you’re golden,” Quentin says. “What do you do for her?”

“I’m kind of a royal events planner slash all purpose helping hand,” Eliot says. “A lot of seating charts and decoration schemes for state dinners and diplomatic summits, some relationship building with local community representatives. Pitching in when magic’s needed.”

“That’s cool,” Quentin says. “Do you like it?”

“I do, actually,” Eliot says. “I mean — my boss is great. Coworkers are a little quirky, but we’ve kind of bonded at this point — it’s nice, to have things feel familiar. And —” He tilts his head, considering. “I like — being part of something without having to be in charge. God love Margo, she thrives on that shit — being the one to call the shots, having her eyes on all the moving pieces. That much responsibility makes me break out. But it’s nice, when I can feel like — what I’m doing matters, but I’m not the only one it’s on. I like being part of a team, I guess.”

“It sounds like you’ve really carved out a path that works for you,” Quentin says.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “weirdly, I think I have. What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m kind of between things right now,” says Quentin. “I was in grad school, and then things got kind of screwed up, and I wound up sort of burning out. Now I’m trying to figure out where I want things to go from here.”

“That’s smart,” says Eliot. “Are you from the area?”

“No, actually,” says Quentin, “I grew up in New York. Well — technically New Jersey, but. In my _heart_ , I grew up in New York.”

“Uh huh.”

“We were like, right over the bridge when I was a kid,” Quentin says. “And I went to college in the city, so. It counts.”

“Sure,” Eliot says. “What brought you to California?”

“I’d gotten into kind of a rut, back home,” Quentin says. “I was making some pretty terrible choices, and I knew that, but I kept making them. I thought a change of scenery might help. Break some patterns, find some ones.”

“And has it helped?” asks Eliot.

“Yeah,” says Quentin, “I think it has.”

They can’t quite keep the bit going past the point when the food arrives, but the night feels like a first date anyway. They talk about weird adolescent fixations and niche opinions, favorite TV shows and formative bands, the councilmembers at Whitespire and the residents of the house on the bay — old things that never came up in fifty years on a planet without pop culture, new things it feels good to take the time to explain, unhurried, attention rapt. Quentin is so in love, but somehow talking with Eliot across the candlelight flickering on the white tablecloth he feels like he’s falling in love, still — tilting further into it, discovering new depths, finding it infinite. Every time he makes Eliot laugh it feels like an achievement.

When they’ve finished eating and the food is settling, Eliot asks, “So, were we thinking dessert?”

“Personally, I was thinking about what your dick will taste like in my mouth,” says Quentin. “But I hear the tiramisu’s good.”

Eliot nearly chokes on his water. That’s fun. “Where the fuck is that fucking waiter?”

It’s dark out by the time they get to the mint-green house on the bay. Quentin leads them there and then turns to walk around it, to Eliot’s skepticism. “Seriously? We’re not going inside yet?”

“Come on, Eliot,” Quentin says, “you can’t tell me some part of you isn’t dying to take a moonlit walk on the beach holding hands with your boyfriend. That shit is romantic as hell.”

The word _boyfriend_ does something funny to Eliot’s face. “Okay, Points may have been made.” He looks down when he says it like he’s a little embarrassed, but he slips his hand in Quentin’s hand and follows him out back.

There’s actually not much moonlight — a slender crescent, elegantly curved. It’s the new moon in a few nights, Quentin remembers; he should start getting materials ready for planting, although if he misses it this month because he’s distracted by true love, there are worse things. The stars, though, are out in full force, sparkling in the cloudless sky. Quentin feels his heart swelling with love for them, for this whole night — the stars in their tiny prettiness, the deep darkness of the sky and the soft sighing of the bay on the beach, the sand shifting under their feet and above all Eliot’s hand warm in his. They walk as far as they can go, right to the edge of the selkies’ territory, where Quentin slips the towel out of his pocket and runs the tuts to bring it full size so he can lay it on the sand.

“Wow,” Eliot says, sitting down. “You really thought this through.”

“Well, my boyfriend is like, super high-maintenance,” says Quentin. Eliot’s face does that funny thing again — somewhere between a smile and an ache. “So I wanted to pull out all the stops.” He gestures towards the water. “You know, selkie culture involves a lot of nocturnal rituals. One kind of cool thing about living near them is that if you come out here on the right night, you can hear their songs.” He checks the time on his phone. “If I’ve timed this right…”

Out of the water, the selkies’ voices rise, deep and strong, that harsh yet oddly lovely sound — swelling in rich and eerie harmony, filling the night with music, drawing out a plaintive melody before whipping the music into a fierce frenzy of joy, strains of wistful song blooming into pulsing choruses and back.

“What the fuck,” says Eliot, “are they singing Like a goddamn Prayer?”

“I might have called in a favor,” Quentin says. “They really liked that mix we made. Mostly the tracks you put on it, so. It’s kind of fitting, that this is for you.”

“I —” Eliot blinks at him, speechless.

“This is actually a pretty good song,” Quentin admits, listening to the music. “You know that opening guitar riff was done by Prince?”

“Believe it or not, I did,” Eliot says. “I’ve always loved this song.”

Quentin laughs. “Because it’s about sucking dick?”

“Excuse me?” Eliot says, appalled, like it’s _so crazy_ to suggest some kind of association between Eliot and blow jobs. “That’s your takeaway from one of the most iconic singles of the twentieth century? That it’s about sucking dick?”

“Uh, yeah?” Quentin says, frowning. “I’m on my knees, I wanna take you there — how is that about anything but a blow job?”

Eliot rolls his eyes. “ _Obviously_ , the sexual aspect is there, deliberately, and it’s _important_ , but that’s because it’s _about_ like, reclaiming the holiness of physical love as an act of transcendence — it’s not _not_ about sucking dick, but it’s also not not about prayer, and it’s not not about sucking dick _as_ prayer, and the whole _point_ is that she’s blurring that line between the sacred and the profane, because like, the profane _is_ sacred, actually.”

“You know we’re talking about a song by Madonna, right?” says Quentin. “Like, fake-Kabbalah Madonna.”

“Yes, Quentin,” Eliot says, exasperated, “I am aware that we are talking about a song by one of the most influential and singular artists in the history of American popular music. I’m not out here arguing that Katy fucking Perry is secretly singing about existentialism.”

“Okay, stop talking,” Quentin says, “you’re ruining my big romantic gesture.”

Eliot rolls his eyes but leans back on his palms, listening. He’s so fucking beautiful, stretched out under the stars, perfect mouth still petulant, eyes filling with something sweet and glad. His nose, the curve of his neck, his wrists — Quentin knows his body so well, but it feels so new to look at it now, unafraid of his own welcome wanting. He wants Eliot so much, in so many ways — wants to treat him right and fuck his brains out and bite into his skin and fall asleep against his back, wants to suck his dick and hold his hand, wants to look and hold and kiss and touch and have, wants to take and wants to give, mind and heart, body and soul.

The selkies sing _I hear you call my name, and it feels like home_ , and Quentin thinks — fine, whatever. Maybe Eliot has a point.

As the song fades Quentin remembers: another dark night, a lifetime ago under two strange moons. Stars spread above them, Eliot glowing under torchlight. He remembers thinking that night, after he’d begun something he hadn’t intended to start, that the feeling he didn’t even know yet to call love was like those flickering fires: beautiful and dangerous, mesmerizing and deadly, quick to burn and painful to touch. He thought then that what had ignited between them would raze him to the ground or extinguish itself in one cold blow, and he lived for years trembling with the fear of the heat of his own heart.

He doesn’t feel that way, tonight. His love feels like the ocean: fluid, steady, eternal and vast. Always changing, always exactly itself. Powerful and teeming with life. Lovely, stretching out on the shore, and deep — so deep he can’t even see how far it goes.

He says, “Hey.”

Eliot looks at him, smiling. “Mm?”

“I love you,” Quentin says.

Eliot swallows. “I love you, too.”

“I’m gonna love you for the rest of my life. And —” Quentin’s throat tightens, just for a second. “And I want that to be a really, really long time.”

Eliot opens his mouth, closes it, eyes overwhelmed like he’s too moved to speak. That’s okay. Quentin’s said pretty much everything he needs to, for now. For everything else, they’ll have time.

Quentin kisses Eliot, gentle and sure. Easy, easy; he can’t believe how easy this is.

Eliot melts into him immediately, like he’s been waiting not just all night, not just since they talked by the boardwalk, but maybe his whole life. For Quentin, and for this — for someone to choose him, with his whole open heart. Quentin couldn’t give him that when they came together, in their other life — not because he didn’t want to, but because he’d spent so long at war with himself he couldn’t do anything with all of himself, least of all something good. They grew into it with time, or near enough, but Quentin’s glad that they get to do this part over — that Eliot gets to know, from the start, exactly what this is. That both of them do.

Eliot runs his hands along Quentin’s back almost like he’s scooping him up and Quentin lets the gesture pull him into Eliot’s lap, so they can press against each other, feeling that touch and that heat. Quentin kisses him deep, hungry, a hunger that grows with every touch, every press of Eliot’s tongue against his and Eliot’s palms against his side, like his body is remembering what it’s like to really want, what wanting _is_. Lighting up some ancient pull inside him. They’re moving slow, exploratory, keeping their hands above their clothes, but there’s a firmness in Eliot’s touch and an eagerness in his mouth that’s building desire in Quentin’s gut quick and fierce, and he can tell from the way Eliot moans into his mouth and from Eliot’s cock stiffening beneath him that Eliot is feeling it too.

Eliot moves Quentin’s hair back to kiss at his ear, lick along the shell, bite the lobe deliberately, ungentle, and Quentin lets out a low groan, a louder one when Eliot does it again, holding the back of his head firm, louder still as Eliot stays there with his teeth and his hot breath in Quentin’s ear and his cock hard beneath Quentin’s hips starting to rock against him. “Fuck,” Quentin says, “oh, fuck, El —”

That’s the switch flipping, dam breaking: hunger coming to the fore, the two of them tearing at each other, Eliot untucking Quentin’s shirt to run his hands possessively along the skin of his back while Quentin bites at Eliot’s neck, runs his tongue along the smooth skin. “Jesus, Q, I’m so — I’m —” He doesn’t say what he is, though; he kisses Quentin again like he’s fucking dying for it, sucking at Quentin’s bottom lip, kissing him breathless while every piece just makes him want _more_. Quentin holds his face in his hands and kisses him roughly back, leaning forward with his weight until Eliot starts lying back so that Quentin is on top of him, feeling power-drunk with — Eliot beneath him, gorgeous and wanting, his hands and his mouth and his hips moving and searching and taking and saying all the same thing, a silent language where all the words are _you, you, you_.

“You’re fucking perfect,” Quentin breathes into his ear, “is what you are. You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, and you’re the love of my life, and —” He sits up, throws up the tuts for a set of wards in record time, unable to keep the laugh out of his voice. “And now, I’m gonna suck your dick.”

“Fuck,” Eliot lets out, sounding flattened by shock, even though, like, this is the most predictable thing Quentin’s done all night.

Quentin makes quick work of his belt, with maybe a _slight_ magical boost just to speed things through. Just for a moment he rests his palm against the curve of Eliot’s cock beneath black fabric, letting himself sink into the anticipation of what it’ll look like, what it’ll feel like huge and heavy in his mouth. Fuck — _fuck_. He flicks his eyes up to see Eliot staring at him open-mouthed, like he’s taking in how much Quentin wants to do this, and shivering a little under his gaze Quentin keeps eye contact while slowly he undoes the button of Eliot’s slacks. 

“You know,” he says, trying to sound conversational but too rough-edged to really manage it, “I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but — I swear to god, half the time I manage to convince myself that I’ve like, talked myself into thinking your dick is bigger than it actually is. I picture it in my head and I’m like, _no, Quentin, you’re being ridiculous. It’s not_ that _big_. But then —” Slowly he rolls Eliot’s zipper down; slowly he tugs his waistband down, followed by the elastic of his briefs, revealing — there it is — Eliot’s huge fucking cock, curving red-dark, one single drop of precome wet on the tip. Quentin’s breath stutters to look at it. “Then,” he says, eyes back on Eliot's face, “I see it again, and it really is — exactly as big as I want it to be.”

Eliot makes a noise that sounds like it got lost on the way to becoming a word.

“Okay,” Quentin says, “that’s enough chitchat.” And then he fucking dives for it, for Eliot’s dick filling up his mouth, pressing down on his working tongue, scraping against the roof of his mouth, the musky scent and the salt taste, Quentin’s own spit dribbling past his lips as he drags the ring of his mouth up and down, the thickness of Eliot’s cock in his hand gripping the base while Eliot strains to keep his hips still. Quentin loves that, too — the proof of his effect on him, evidence of how good he knows how to make it. He’s fucking good at this, and he likes being good at it; his own dick twitches as Eliot starts making these incredible helpless sounds, _Fuck_ and _Q_ punctuating coarse sighs while his breath goes uneven. He brings a hand to the back of Quentin’s head and leaves it there, limp, like he’d meant to pull but can’t muster the necessary focus, which is almost as hot.

Eliot’s hips buck up once more, his arousal overtaking his restraint, and Quentin lifts his head. Eliot looks so undone, face slack, head thrown back gorgeous in the dark night, it takes Quentin a moment to speak.

“You can fuck my face,” he says, turning him _self_ on as he says it, “I want you to, El — I want you to take it, whatever feels good, whatever gets you coming in my mouth.”

Eliot blinks up at him, stupefied. Quentin doesn’t wait for a response; he gets back to work, marveling at how doing this feels always _right_ , his cells aligning as the world shrinks to the sensation of Eliot’s cock sliding in and out of his mouth. Fortunately, Eliot doesn’t need to be told twice; he starts moving his hips with purpose now, rough deep thrusts that take Quentin all the way to the edge of gagging, that place he loves because it feels like a challenge, because every push of the head of Eliot’s dick right up against his throat feels like a place he can prove how good he is, how well he can take it, how much he wants this — because it feels like being used, like he’s giving Eliot the gift of unleashing his own selfishness, for a few minutes taking on enough care for the both of them. That might be kind of a fucked up way to think about it, it occurs to him as Eliot fucks against his tongue, but his body feels too right for him to care, holding perfectly still to let Eliot take what he wants, ignoring his own hard-on with a weird flush of pride, listening to Eliot’s grunting cries, undignified, unperformed, base and speaking only hunger, until finally, finally, with one last hard thrust he’s spurting come salt-bitter and warm into Quentin’s mouth and Quentin’s swallowing, swallowing, drinking all of it up, not a drop escaping him, the deep satisfaction that he knows how to be good — swallowing and sucking through the long aftershocks, dazed with the culmination of his efforts and Eliot’s deep shuddering breaths as he comes back to himself, and, fuck it, Madonna’s right: this does feel goddamn holy.

Quentin sits up, uncomfortably hard in his fashionable jeans. Eliot is staring at him, mouth open. That’s very satisfying.

“We can go in the house now,” Quentin says. “Although I’d kind of rather wait a couple minutes so I don’t run into any of my roommates with a giant hard-on. Kind of awkward, you know?”

“I —” Eliot sits up, tucks his softening cock back into place, fixes up his pants. Quentin watches him do it, feeling fond.

“I always like seeing you touch your dick,” he says. “Even if it’s just something like that. I don’t think I ever told you that, either.”

Eliot gives him a look. “Yeah, I’m starting to feel like there’s a lot you’ve never told me.”

Quentin laughs. “I keep a lot inside, you know? Because of how I’m like a really fucked up person. But I’m getting better about that, I think.”

“Uh huh,” Eliot says. “You —” Seeming to give up on making conversation, Eliot leans over and kisses him, hard.

Quentin hums happily into his mouth; it never gets old, Eliot licking furiously into the lingering taste of his own come in Quentin’s mouth. Maybe Quentin should tell him about that one, too. Not now, though; now, Eliot is kissing him somehow even more desperately than before, kissing like he’s trying to take Quentin’s fucking life force for his own. It’s hot. Very hot, actually: Eliot yanking him by the hips back into his lap, rough and possessive even though he’s already come, like instead of satiating him his orgasm just reminded him of how much he wants Quentin, all the things Quentin can do. Quentin shivers against the force of that desire, feeling its heat transfer into him, filling him up, making him wilder and more eager, moving him to touch Eliot all over, anywhere he can reach, grinding unthinkingly against him, dying for some overdue release, a motion that inspires Eliot to — _fuck_ — grip his ass in encouragement, like there’s nothing he’d rather Quentin do. Holding tight there he breaks the kiss to suck viciously at Quentin’s neck, a shock of pain-pleasure that sends him collapsing atop Eliot’s shoulder, gasping for breath as the feeling travels like electricity through his whole body, his abdomen clenching with the wave of sensation.

“Jesus, El,” he breathes, “are you trying to make me come in my fucking pants?”

Eliot goes very, very still at that, which — oh. “Oh,” Quentin says out loud, because he’d said it as a joke about how horny he was, but he’s picturing it now — picturing himself making a mess in his nice new clothes, unable to hold out for more than that, picturing Eliot watching him, _liking_ it, to see what he could make Quentin do.

“I — wasn’t, but —” Eliot stops, like he’s not sure he’s allowed to keep going.

Quentin can help with that, he thinks. “Yeah. Eliot, yes, I want that, I want —”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eliot whispers, and swiftly maneuvers them so that Quentin is on his back, Eliot’s long body warm and close on top of him, hands — yes, yes, _yes_ — bringing Quentin’s arms to rest above his head, pinning him down unforgivingly by the wrists. Quentin squirms beneath him, feeling every single thing evaporate except this: Eliot’s hands strong and almost painful circling his wrists, his body held in place, knowing Eliot would never keep him anywhere he didn’t want to be but loving how this position still feels like there’s no fucking escape. Fucked up, maybe; so good, so good.

Eliot kisses him again, grinding with a firm rhythm against Quentin’s achingly hard cock while Quentin pushes up against his weight, overcome with the thrill of helplessness as Eliot’s hold won’t budge, won’t give, only presses down harder like he’s punishing Quentin for trying to get away. _Fuck_. This is gonna be over humiliatingly quick, Quentin thinks, a fresh flush of heat coating his face at the thought of being made to enact the exact desperation of his wanting; but then Eliot, goddamn him — lifts his fucking hips and looks Quentin in the eye. “Hey, Q. Having a good time?”

God, getting him off first was a mistake; Quentin sees that now. “El,” he says pleadingly, “El, come on —”

“Come on what?” Eliot says, smirking. He is the worst, why is Quentin in giddy forever love with the worst person on earth? “We’re having a nice night, hanging out on the beach. It’s a great view, by the way. I can see why you like it here.”

“El I’m so close to getting off I feel like my dick is gonna explode,” Quentin says. “Please can you just — something, anything, touch me, let me jerk off, let me hump your leg like a fucking dog, just — _please_.”

“Hmm.” Eliot lowers his hips against Quentin’s, brings them back as soon as Quentin moves against him. “And why would I do that?”

“Because,” Quentin says, “because I’m so fucking hard, and it’s your fault, Eliot — your fucking — hands all over me, your curly fucking hair, your giant cock all over my mouth, fucking into me — you know how much I love that. You know I love — gagging for it, choking on it, swallowing you down. You know that does it for me. And I was” — blushing furiously, this is so embarrassing, he wants it so much — “I was good, I was so good for you. I earned it, I did it right. I —” He swallows, lost for a second in his own words and Eliot’s hands still on his wrists and his aching dick. “Is this, is this what you wanted? You wanted to hear me talk about — how bad I wanted you, how good I can be?”

“I —” Eliot is staring at him bemused, like he really kind of thought he’d have to work a little harder for this. Quentin _loves_ that. “Yeah this is — this is good —”

“You want to hear me talk about how I’d never even thought about that shit before, but the second I imagined coming in my pants for you I wanted it like nothing fucking else?” Quentin says, back arching. “Because I do, El — I want to fucking — ruin my brand new pants with how much I want you, what you fucking do to me — these are the most expensive jeans I’ve ever owned, you know that? I bet you do, I bet you like that — I bet that’s a fucking turn-on for you, me dressing up for you, fucking it up, making a mess because I’m so — desperate, I’m so greedy, I’m — such a freak, so fucking dirty —”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Eliot spits, grip tightening on Quentin’s wrists, “where is this _coming_ from, is this some kind of fucking _spell_ —”

Quentin laughs. “No spell — just me. This is all me — so fucking filthy, so dirty — so fucked in the head and so goddamn eager for it — and I want you so bad, I’m so fucking in love with you, I’ll let you do goddamn anything to me, because — because you give me everything. You see it all, all my weird fucked up shit, how I want to fucking — embarrass myself under you like this, how it turns me on when you hold me down, like I’m your fucking toy, what the fuck is that about — and you love it, you love all of it, you make it all feel so good. You make me feel so dirty and so good. So fucking — shameful, and so right. I want so much — I want so goddamn much it scares me, so much I can barely even look at it sometimes. I’m so fucking greedy for it, but you — you just give it to me, El,” he says, almost dreamily. “You give me every filthy, dirty, perfect thing.”

Somewhere in there must have been the magic word because Eliot finally takes mercy on him and brings his body back down for Quentin to rut against desperately, pathetically, gloriously. “Was that right,” he says with his last strain of conscious thought, “was that good enough —”

“That was so good, Q,” Eliot whispers back against him, sounding overcome. “So good, you were so good” — Quentin shudders in the glow of the word — “you’re so good for me, so dirty and so good —” And Quentin comes, almost violently, Eliot holding him through it while he spills damp and hot and messy into the most expensive pair of jeans he’s ever owned.

He lies there panting for what seems like a long time or else a moment outside of time, a bubble of infinity. Eliot sits to the side, one hand resting softly on Quentin’s hair. When Quentin catches his eye Eliot is looking at him like he has just disembarked from an alien spaceship and is also the best thing Eliot’s ever seen. “Jesus fuck, El,” he says unhelpfully.

“Well,” Eliot says, “luckily for us we’re magicians. So —” He works a quick tut and cleans up the mess in Quentin’s crotch. “Consider that particular cake both had and eaten.” He glances at Quentin’s lower body. “Those are really nice jeans. And they look great on you.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says. “Julia helped.”

Eliot purses his lips in a fond smile. “No offense, but I kind of assumed.”

Quentin sits up. He feels like he’s running on turbocharged batteries. “Can I take you home now?”

“You can take me to the fucking moon,” Eliot says, shaking his head helplessly, like he can’t even believe how far gone he is, which makes Quentin grin, because — like, same.

Back in Quentin’s bedroom Eliot presses him up against the wall as soon as the door is shut behind them, kissing his mouth with renewed ferocity that Quentin is eager to reciprocate. He loves this, loves every messy desperate kiss and the crush of their bodies against each other, Eliot’s ribs heaving under his hands and Eliot’s touch all over him, down his arms, up his sides, along his back.

“Where’s the fucking light switch,” Eliot breathes against him, “I want to see you for this one —”

Shivering already in anticipation of whatever _this one_ entails Quentin reaches to flick it on, thrilling at the sight of Eliot looking down at him — he’s so stupidly tall — with eyes dark with desire. “You like the outfit that much, huh?” Eliot smirks, stroking his knuckles softly down the side of Quentin’s face, sliding his hand towards the back of his neck, looking him up and down, his bright white dress shirt disheveled now after their activities on the beach. “Isn’t that what you fucking wanted?”

Quentin bites his lip. “Yeah,” he says. “This was all for you.”

He’s actually not sure that’s as true as he long would have assumed, but it was the right thing to say. Eliot hisses a breath in, eyeing Quentin once more, running his fingers along the collar of Quentin’s shirt, past the button Quentin left undone, bringing his hand to rest at the next one down, his skin just barely touching the skin at the top of Quentin’s sternum. “Job well done,” he murmurs, half-mocking, half-sincere, and Quentin swallows at the heat rising in him, half-embarrassed, half-pleased. “Now let’s get these lovely things off, shall we?”

And Quentin makes his eyes wide and says, “Oh, I don’t know, El.”

“Are you trying to take this slow or something?” Eliot says. “Because if so, then I have to tell you, blowing me on the beach was a weird fucking move.”

“It’s not that, it’s just —” Quentin bats his eyelashes, just a little. “I’m like, kind of really insecure, you know?”

Eliot raises an eyebrow. “You’re what?”

“Yeah, you know, I—” He shrugs. “I have all these, like, body image things, I don’t know if I’m really ready, emotionally.” Quentin’s trying to really sell it, but he’s too giddy to keep a straight face. He’s grinning as he adds, “Because of like, the magazines.”

Eliot is staring at him mutinously. “You are so fucking annoying.”

“The patriarchy hurts men too,” Quentin says, smiling like his face could split in two.

Eliot takes a long breath in through his nose, like Quentin is testing his patience. Then he reaches his fingers into Quentin’s hair and makes a brutal fist — Quentin’s mouth falls open, chest sagging at the shock — and he leans down to say right into Quentin’s face, voice hard and low and uncompromising and so, so, so hot, “Shut up and take off your _fucking_ clothes, Quentin, because if I don’t get to look at your fucking body in the next twenty seconds, I’m going to tear these nice clothes off you with my bare hands.”

And Quentin nods peaceably, cock jumping to attention, hormones already sending him to outer space. “Yes, sir.”

“The _fuck_?” Eliot whispers, almost to himself.

Belatedly Quentin realizes he’s only ever called Eliot that in his head while jerking off. He doesn’t really have the bandwidth to go into it right now, though — not with Eliot letting go of his hair so he can follow instructions, a concept that lights up whatever screwy part of his brain can imagine nothing fucking hotter. Somewhere along the way, the part of him desperate to escape himself must have burrowed deep enough into his psyche to get tangled up with the entire rest of his id. It kind of feels like he should be shedding that with all this, like, self-actualization or whatever, instead of leaning the fuck in, but for better or worse it's too hot for him to really care.

Besides, this — sliding his jacket off and dropping it to the side, opening his buttons one by one with his eyes fixed on Eliot’s face staring at him with undisguised lust, stiffening further at the sound of undoing his belt buckle in the silent room, the leather sliding through the loops and the clunk of the metal hitting the floor — it doesn’t feel like running away. Eliot presses one sure hand to the bulge in his pants while he watches Quentin slip off his shoes and unzip his jeans and shimmy out of them awkwardly, slide off his boxers and his socks until he’s standing there naked, erection bobbing in front of him untouched, flushing under Eliot’s gaze, and — he feels so safe, under the edge of uncertainty that kicks up his pulse as he wonders what next. Eliot’s here; there’s nowhere Quentin would rather be.

“Aren’t you gonna join me?” Quentin asks. He thinks he knows the answer, but he wants to hear Eliot say it.

Eliot strokes himself through his pants, slowly. “I was going to,” he says. “But you wanted to be a brat about it, so —” Quentin’s breath speeds up. “There’s been a change of plans.”

“So,” Quentin says, feeling like he’s on some weird erotic tightrope, “what are you giong to do to me now?”

Eliot narrows his eyes, like he’s considering it or like he just wants to — look. Like he wants to make Quentin stand there and take it, take his gaze and his desire, unhidden, raw. Quentin struggles to keep from flinching away from him out of habit, to keep his body standing straight and on display, enjoying the struggle, the sense of winning something against himself, of proving to Eliot what he can do. Enjoying beneath it all being seen.

Eliot steps over to him agonizingly slowly, building suspense. He runs a finger down Quentin’s chest, back up, going past his neck to tilt Quentin’s jaw upwards; Quentin shudders at the lightness of his touch, the sense of being led. Softly, firmly, Eliot reaches a hand to the back of his neck and guides him like he’s tugging him by a fucking collar — which, wow, Quentin was _not_ expecting that mental image to have the effect on him it does — so that he’s standing at the edge of the bed. In that voice that brooks no argument, Eliot says, “Bend over.”

Quentin doesn’t need to be told twice.

For a moment he half-lies there, feet on the floor, chest on the mattress, ass in the air, his cock heavy with what he thinks is coming while Eliot takes his sweet goddamn time, tracing his fingers along the lines of Quentin’s back. “You’re gorgeous,” he murmurs. Quentin feels like he’s melting with Eliot’s soft fingers smoothing along his skin. “So fucking beautiful.”

Quentin’s hips jerk forward, drag back, trying to get some clumsy friction against his aching dick, hearing the echo of Eliot’s words in his ears, _gorgeous, beautiful, gorgeous, beautiful…_

Eliot’s hands grab him roughly by the hips. “None of that, now,” he says chidingly, pulling him back so that Quentin’s cock can’t reach the bed anymore. “You said, remember” — and there’s a scrape in his voice just too rough to be part of the game — “you said I was good at this. You said I give you everything you want. Every filthy, dirty thing. Didn’t you?”

Quentin nods against the mattress. “I did. You do. All of it, El.”

“Well,” Eliot says, “that’s what I’m going to do.”

And he brings down a hand, sharp and swift, against Quentin’s ass.

Quentin’s entire body reacts to the impact, breath knocked out of him. He fists the sheets as Eliot does it again — again — and again — only — Quentin squirms, trying to will Eliot’s motions to be — just a little _more_. It’s good, it’s nice, but Quentin doesn’t _want_ nice, he wants — he wants so fucking much —

“Did you forget how I like it,” he shoots out, “or do you just like hearing me beg?”

“Jesus,” Eliot says, sounding genuinely startled. Quentin can’t hold back a smirk. “Uh — six of one?” He rests his hands on Quentin’s ass. The contact, the anticipation of _more_ , makes him feel out of his mind.

“Okay,” Quentin says. “Well, let me remind you — I want you to smack my ass like you fucking mean it.”

“ _Fuck_.” Eliot’s grip on his ass tightens.

“And if you want me to beg, I can fucking beg.” Quentin makes himself sound — a little younger, a little more innocent, exactly as needy as he feels. “Please — please, El, I need it — I need you, I need it so bad — come on, come on, please, you know, you know what I need — I can’t get it anywhere else — there’s no one else who’ll give it to me like you, El, please, _please_ —”

“Fucking —” Eliot sputters, sounding wild, and then — thank the blessed heavens above — he hits Quentin’s ass fucking _hard_.

Quentin loses track of reality after that. He’s lost in it — in the beat of Eliot’s open palm coming down again and again, not quite steady enough to get into a rhythm, keeping each smack a fresh surprise, making his toes curl with anticipation as he waits in lulls that stretch on and on, startling him with one right after another. The sting radiating on his skin with each hit. That loud cracking sound of skin on skin, and his own guttural cries filling the room. He feels fucking drugged, words gone, time evaporated, everything rendered immaterial except Eliot’s hand and that all-consuming sensation deliciously right past the edge of pain. The shame and pleasure of it burning through his blood.

He’s so blissed out it takes him a moment to realize when Eliot’s stopped, apparently for real. “El,” he says, voice thick, “what are you —”

Quentin chokes on the words as Eliot slides one long slick finger into his hole.

“Thought you might be ready for something new,” he whispers. “Was I right?”

“Always,” Quentin moans, feeling the pleasure sparking up inside him, nerves waking up as his body relaxes while Eliot works him open. “You always know exactly what I want.”

“You’re fucking right I do,” Eliot says, almost cocky but his voice can’t help overflowing tenderness. Eliot is so funny like that, Quentin thinks affectionately, right before Eliot slides another finger in him and his hips buck backwards against him of their own accord. It feels so good, the sensation and the memory of what it brings.

“So,” Quentin says, “so tell me, El — what do I want, huh?”

“You want me to fuck you,” Eliot says, and it’s that same thing where he’s saying the hard-edged thing but when the words come out of his mouth they sound like _I love you_. Quentin feels like he could combust with how wonderful Eliot is. “You want me to fill you the fuck up” — another one, the stretch and the anticipation intensifying — “and you want my cock —”

“All the time,” Quentin says. “I’m obsessed —”

“Greedy little cockslut,” Eliot plays along, and Quentin shudders. “Desperate for my dick pounding into you —”

Oh, _fuck_. “Yes —”

“You want me, you want me — making you mine, making you come, fucking all the way into you — is that right?”

“Yeah,” Quentin gasps, “yes, Eliot, please —”

“Good,” Eliot says, and now he does sound self-satisfied, smug in a way that makes Quentin feel weak. “Because I’m going to fucking give it to you.”

He brings his hand back, presses the head of his cock against Quentin’s hole, lingering there presumably just to make Quentin feel insane. Then he pushes in, slowly — in — “Fuck,” Quentin gasps — further in, that iterating sequence of burn-pleasure, the sting of the stretch giving way to the flood of how good it feels getting _fucked_ , the fullness where Eliot’s cock is pushing into him hot and thick, the spread of electricity through his entire body, through his gut and his chest and all the way down his limbs until he’s bent over useless with arousal, his own cock still impossibly hard, and Eliot’s fucking slowly into him and he _still has more dick to go_.

“Eliot,” he manages to get it together to say, “come on — all of it —”

Hands on Quentin’s hips, Eliot says, “Are you sure?”

Even as turned on as he has been in his entire life, Quentin honestly almost laughs, because, like — every time. Every _single_ time. You could set your goddamn watch by Eliot Waugh wanting to be told that yes Quentin does want his obscenely huge dick in his ass all the way to the fucking hilt. It’s so stupid that Quentin finds it incredibly endearing. Plus, if Quentin had Eliot’s dick, he’d probably be vain about that too. “I’m so fucking sure, I want it — every goddamn inch jackhammering away, I want you inside me where it almost fucking hurts, your cock is so big and so _good_ —”

Eliot pushes into him then, hard and deep and certain; Quentin makes a noise he barely recognizes as his own. “Like that,” he gasps, “yes, please — more, El, just like that, don’t stop —”

“Well,” Eliot says, nails digging in possessively at Quentin’s sides, “since you asked so nicely.”

Then he starts fucking Quentin for real, long, eager thrusts, hitting him right _there_ , sending his every cell vibrating with. Quentin feels spoiled, plastered to the mattress barely moving as Eliot gives and gives and gives his cock, doing nothing but lying there crying out and aching with desire and in return offered up not just the ecstasy of getting fucked senseless but the low grunts in Eliot’s throat, the ones he only lets loose when he’s really gone for it, his face still out of sight which feels somehow like a luxury and a punishment at once and equally hot in both directions, the mental image enhanced by the memory that he’s still wearing all his fucking clothes.

“Fuck,” Eliot says, rough, “fuck, Q, you feel so good — you take it so good, you’re so good —”

“It’s so good,” Quentin babbles back, not sure if he’s agreeing or returning the compliment, “so fucking good — can I _please_ touch myself, please —”

He’s expecting a _yeah, baby_ , already moving his hand down, sure he’s going to come as soon as _something_ touches his dick. But Eliot says, “What if I say no — what if I want you to come just from this — just for my cock —”

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Quentin breathes. “Yeah — yeah, I want that — but then you better fuck me harder —”

Eliot shifts, then — starts moving faster, hungrier, picking up the speed, dropping his steady rhythm — fucking him ruthless and rough and selfish, fucking like he’s chasing his own orgasm and getting close, close, and Quentin fucking — _yells_ as he comes, wetting the sheets and his bedroom floor, gasping as he feels Eliot coming into him with a few final short thrusts right after.

Eliot slides out of him, gently; Quentin feels a tickle as Eliot casts to clean them up. He should be exhausted because his body sort of feels like someone put it through a washing machine, but he feels unbelievably energized. Quentin turns himself and sits on edge of the bed to look up at Eliot, damp with sweat and somehow all the more gorgeous for it. “I can’t believe you’re still like fully dressed.”

“Yes, well,” Eliot says, eyes still wide with some lingering astonishment, “I think we can agree this has been a day of surprises for the both of us.”

Quentin laughs, because for him it’s been a lot more than a _day_. God. If someone had told him the day he came to California that his life would lead him _here_ — he shakes his head, newly amazed. “Take your shoes off, I wanna make out but my legs need a break.”

Eliot obliges, although of course he doesn’t kick them off the way Quentin would; he bends down to take them off with his hands and places them securely to the side. Quentin likes him so much it’s nuts. “You’re very hard to say no to, you know,” he says, adjusting them so that he’s lying on top of Quentin.

“I think you might just be in love with me,” Quentin says.

Eliot smiles. “I might be.”

Quentin runs his hands along the length of Eliot’s back, plays with his hair, sucks gently at his bottom lip; he’s warm and cozy and in love. They kiss slow, lazy, sweet movements given a frisson of excitement by the weird hotness of pressing up fully naked against Eliot in his elegant date night outfit. He feels offered up, or taken in, or else he just likes the slight wrongness of it, the indication of some kind of disparity. It’s enough that although he was sort of thinking of this portion of the evening as like, advanced cuddling, settling him into sleep, his body takes the opposite turn, sharpening again, making it clear he hasn’t had his fill. He feels like he never will; like he has all of Eliot and he’ll always want more. Good, he thinks, surprising himself with his fierceness; Eliot deserves to be wanted like that, and Quentin’s lucky to be the one to do it.

“Okay,” he says, “let’s —” He sits up, nudges Eliot to get down so Quentin can straddle him; smiles down as he starts unknotting Eliot’s tie. Eliot watches him do it, working slowly; Quentin likes that, he realizes, Eliot’s eyes on his own careful hands. He slides the tie off Eliot’s neck once it’s loose, almost dropping it to the side before he figures Eliot might not want that. Instead Quentin folds it up and places it on the nightstand.

He moves on to Eliot’s vest next, tugging at it just enough to get Eliot to sit up so he can take it off; fold it; place it to the side; on to the buttons of Eliot’s shirt. Neither of them says anything about not talking but as Quentin keeps working in silence and Eliot keeps silently watching him it starts to feel like a rule, or like a question that hasn’t been answered. The silence is a palpable thing in the room with them, drawing attention to every rustle of fabric, every hitch in Eliot’s breath as Quentin undresses him with care, and it’s like Eliot’s outfit against Quentin’s bare body — an unexpected strangeness that gives everything a heightened erotic edge. By the time Eliot is down to nothing but his briefs and Quentin is sliding them slowly down his long, long legs, Eliot’s cock is thick and hard again, and Quentin’s hands are trembling to see it.

He folds Eliot’s underwear; places it on the nightstand with his other clothes. Then he resumes his place astride Eliot’s hips, cock against cock but neither of them moving, eyes locked while neither speaks. It’s like neither wants to be the one to break the spell that makes every gesture — Eliot swallowing, Quentin brushing his hair back — weighty with potential; like both of them like this place where neither of them knows exactly what game they’re playing, who’s in charge or what’s in store.

Fifty years, Quentin thinks suddenly — fifty years together, and he has no idea what’s next. What a fucking miracle.

He lets himself look at Eliot a minute longer — the elegant lines of his body, the dark hair on his chest. His face, his beautiful eyes; his graceful neck. Quentin kisses his mouth, softly; kisses his jaw, his ear, his neck, his collarbone; kisses all the way down his chest, his abdomen, the soft skin beneath his belly button going up and down quick with Eliot’s breath. Noses at his pubic hair, gratefully inhaling the scent; presses his face against Eliot’s cock, the soft skin and its red heat. Then he moves his mouth down, down, kissing at the join of his hips, along his inner thighs; back up his legs, to the center of things there.

Quentin uses his hands at Eliot’s thighs, not so much to pry them open as to make clear his intent; Eliot gasps a little, clueing in, opening his legs. Spreading himself so Quentin can bend down and lick into him, softly at first, enjoying the shock it sends through Eliot’s body. The soft broken noises from the back of his throat, like he can’t believe anyone would want him this deeply, take care of him this well. Quentin’s going to show him — over and over, for the rest of their lives. He wants that so much.

He pushes his tongue deeper in, chasing the way Eliot sounds, desperate and eager even as he’s trying to stay silent, still, breath going wildly, hips betraying his attempts to keep them still. Good, good, Quentin thinks — you should feel so good you can’t hold it back. Always, Eliot, that’s what you deserve. He moves a hand to his own cock and starts stroking himself, intoxicated with the silence and the closeness and Eliot quietly unraveling for his mouth; Eliot lets out a sharp cry when his hand moves and Quentin shudders to think that Eliot likes this, seeing Quentin touch himself because he’s overcome by making Eliot feel good.

He wants to make Eliot feel good, he thinks; he wants to drive Eliot fucking crazy. He wants — god — he wants and wants and wants, jerking off properly now, his motions quickening with his eagerness to make Eliot wild, and he really is feeling greedy tonight, coming twice and wanting more, getting Eliot undone here and it’s not enough because he wants to fucking see it, too. He lifts his head and lets go of his dick to tut quickly and then start fingering Eliot, watching his face now: eyes hooded and wild and dark, brows knitted like he’s feeling that delicious ache, mouth open — yeah, that’s what Quentin wanted to see. He keeps his eyes locked on Eliot’s, just to be sure as he keeps going, working him open, letting him start to fuck himself on Quentin’s hand. He wasn’t planning for this but he just keeps wanting _more_ — more to give Eliot, more to see, Eliot writhing with pleasure, losing control. More to take, more to feel.

Quentin shifts to move up along Eliot’s body, hips connecting once again; this time he presses the head of his cock to Eliot’s hole, a wordless question. Eliot nods, reverent; he sits up, slips out from under Quentin, and gets down on all fours.

It’s hot — Eliot’s gorgeous back, his ass laid out for him — but it’s not what Quentin had in mind. “I want to see you,” he whispers, breaking the silence because it’s so true, “El, I want to watch.”

Eliot’s shoulders shake with a silent laugh as he reaches a hand out, lifting — the mirror off Quentin’s wall, levitating it in front of them.

Quentin swallows, inexplicably nervous, oddly excited. That’s — good enough.

He kneels behind Eliot, pushes into him gently, feeling his body’s resistance, feeling his body’s give; going further in until he hits the spot that makes Eliot moan, and yeah — Eliot’s face in the mirror, his eyes fluttering briefly shut, his grimace of pleasure as Quentin starts moving in him, slow at first, speeding up as he feels sure he’s making it good for Eliot, fucking into the tight heat and into Eliot’s hips working for him, focusing in on Eliot’s red lips parted with the noises escaping them — that’s good, that’s more than fucking good. That’s what he wanted.

Fuck, Eliot feels so good around his dick; Quentin feels fucking dizzy, feeling this good and watching Eliot feel the same. “Touch yourself,” he whispers, “will you —” Eliot moves his hand to his cock and even though Quentin can’t see that in the angle in the mirror he moans, still, heady at the thought of Eliot giving himself that.

“You’re so hot,” he says; he can’t stop talking now, staring at Eliot’s perfect fucked-out face. “You’re so fucking hot, Eliot, your face, your back, your shoulders, your body —”

“Uh huh,” Eliot hums agreeably, smiling faintly.

Quentin breathes a laugh. “Is that why you wanted the mirror,” he teases, and he doesn’t even know if it’s sweet or a sex thing, “to see yourself — to see me watching you, can you see how much I fucking want you? How much you drive me crazy, turn me on —”

“Yeah,” Eliot lets out, low, almost harsh, “yeah, I like that —”

“You’re so fucking vain,” Quentin says, a little mean, extremely fond.

“I’ve never — oh, _fuck_ , Q, your fucking _cock_ —”

Quentin moves a little harder at that, encouraged, fucks a little deeper.

“I am,” Eliot tries again, “I’ve never — fucking Christ — said I wasn’t —”

“No,” Quentin agrees, “you haven’t — you’re so good, El, I fucking love you and I love fucking you and you’re so fucking good —”

“You’re so fucking good,” Eliot says, and Quentin doesn’t know if he means at sex or if he means everything. “So good, Q — Q, look —”

“I am looking,” Quentin says, eyes meeting Eliot’s in the mirror, seeing his face twisted with what Quentin can make him feel. God, there’s nothing, nothing better than knowing that.

“No,” Eliot says, shaking his head, “Q — look at _you_ —”

Quentin’s hip stutter, then; immediately he thinks _no_ , immediately he thinks _I can’t_ , immediately he thinks _I want to fucking die_. But those are old stories, all of them; whoever he is, whoever he’s becoming, he can be more than that. Is, already. He’s more than that and Eliot is here and — he reaches for it like reaching into magic — everything between them is so good, and so safe.

“Look at you,” Eliot says again, insistent, pleading. “Fucking gorgeous — perfect — Q —”

And Quentin — looks. He lifts his eyes to his own mirrored self, fucking the love of his life like it’s what they were both born to do. Heart cracked open to love, body given over to desire. And something shifts in him, watching his hips pump into Eliot’s hips, watching the muscles under his skin move to make Eliot feel good, burning with his own pleasure — watching his own arms, strong and sure at his sides, his own capable hands gripping Eliot tight. His own broad shoulders, sun-darkened after all this time out west, and the paler skin of his own chest heaving, ribs moving air in and out. His own neck dripping sweat. His own hair long and damp, sticking to his own flushed face, his own skin glistening with exertion. His own well-used mouth hanging slack. His own expression twisting raw with pleasure. Quentin looks into his own dark eyes fierce with his untamed desire, all that ferocious longing he could never quite kill, and — thrusting arrhythmically now, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ —

“Do you see it,” Eliot pants, “Q, can you see?”

“I see it,” Quentin says, turned on, terrified, horrified at the way his blood is rushing at the sight of his own hungry body, exhilarated, exalted with how much he wants to keep looking — how he doesn’t want to look away — “El, I see — we’re so good, so — so _hot_ — we're fucking perfect —”

Eliot comes into his hand then, loud and messy, tightening around Quentin’s dick, and Quentin follows, watching the mirror: the two of them undone and remade.

“Holy shit.” Dazed he sits back on his heels.

Eliot makes a noise of assent that sounds like _agneah_.

The mirror drops with a crash, shattering on the floor at the foot of the bed. Eliot laughs, sounding exhausted and happy. “Sorry — I’ll get that.”

He lifts his hand to cast and Quentin says, “Wait — let me.”

Eliot sits up and looks at him curiously. Quentin remembers he hasn’t told Eliot he’s got his magic back; almost like he was saving it for this, before he even knew. “Yeah,” he says, “watch me —”

It’s like a game, like music; like breathing or waking up with the sun — as soon as he asks for it, the power is there, his fingertips buzzing with it. He picks up the broken pieces like fish in a net, but he doesn’t fix it right away; he wants to play a little, he wants to show off for his fucking boyfriend. Laughing with the joy of it, he moves them around, spreading them across the room like stars, swirling them like a whirlpool, like a galaxy; he fires them in arcs like fireworks, spins them around like a chandelier, darting at Eliot watching with a dazzled smile. Then he gathers them up, these shards of light, these bits of potential, and easy as anything he invites them to come back, to slot into the places they want to be. And he feels it, as they stitch themselves back together, smoothing out their jagged edges like water going still after a storm — their buzzing gratitude, their purpose restored. The rightness of it, the power of what he knows how to do.

Returning the mirror to its place on the wall, he turns to Eliot. “Not bad, right?”

Eliot bursts into laughter, giddy and half-delirious. Quentin knows how he feels. “This was really not how I expected a week on the beach to go.”

“California kind of sneaks up on you,” Quentin agrees. He tuts a final clean-up, feeling like it’s his turn, and that’s the thing that tips him over into feeling contentedly flattened out. “After we sleep for like twelve hours I gotta show you around.”

Eliot moves to lie on his back, looking completely spent. Quentin snuggles up against him, sleepy and radiant and so full of fucking joy he could explode. He runs a hand happily through the damp, dark hair on Eliot’s chest. So _sweaty_.

“I love how sweaty your chest gets when we have sex,” Quentin says.

Eliot wrinkles his nose. God, Quentin loves him. “You _do_?”

He nods, grinning. “I always have.”

“ _Why_?” Eliot asks incredulously.

“I dunno.” Quentin strokes back and forth, pondering. “Because you’re so put together all the time, and it means I get to be the one to take you apart, maybe. Or because I know there’s almost nothing else on earth you think is worth breaking a sweat for.” He shrugs. “Or just because it’s you, and it’s some like, Pavlovian thing for me now. Sweaty chest, I probably just came so hard I almost blacked out.”

Eliot shakes his head, eyes rolling back, but he’s smiling. “God, you’re so weird.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, laughing, “ _that’s_ absolutely the weirdest thing you’ve ever learned about my sexuality.”

Eliot laughs, too. The best, the very best sound. “Point taken.” He runs a hand along Quentin’s arm, his back; reaches down to cup Quentin’s thigh, angled across him. “Speaking of breaking a sweat — not to set off your fucking _issues_ , or whatever, and I hope you fucking know by now that I’ve _always_ been obsessed with your thighs, but — am I misremembering things? Or have you been, like, working out?”

Quentin grins. “I bike commute a lot. San Diego’s got a lot of hills, so. Eventually you kind of acclimate.”

“You what?” Eliot says, like he’s not sure Quentin’s speaking English.

“Also I ran six miles this morning,” Quentin says. “Does that count?”

“You _what?_ ”

“I do that every Saturday, actually,” Quentin says. “Sunday if it’s rainy or if I’m feeling lazy. I try to get in at least another ten miles total the rest of the week. Usually it's closer to fifteen.”

Eliot stares at him, agog. “Who the fuck _are_ you?”

Quentin laughs, bright and bubbling like a brook, like magic flowing through him. “Quentin Coldawter,” he says, “it’s nice to meet you. I think we’re going to get along great, don’t you?”

Eliot smiles slowly, still looking dazed. “I’m certainly enjoying the ride so far.”

“Yeah, me too,” Quentin says. “And I gotta tell you — I have a feeling we’re just getting fucking started.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for a content warning relating to **abuse.**

Quentin wakes up with Eliot sleeping next to him in his bed, skin softly pale under the sun through the blinds. The warmth of Eliot’s body against his, the blades of his eyelashes dark and elegant on his cheeks, his face sweetly peaceful at rest and his arm half-draped around Quentin’s waist — Quentin looks at him and thinks: forever. He’s going to love him forever. He could stay here forever, wanting only this — just to look, to smell the sleep-warm scent of him, to curl up in the golden glow of the sun and their love. Forever and ever and ever, and this would be enough.

But he has things to do, so after a few moments of staring in silent awe, Quentin carefully extricates himself from Eliot’s grasp and gets dressed to go downstairs.

Luisa finds him in the kitchen, humming tunelessly to himself and looking through the cabinets while his magic keeps the pancakes on the stove from burning as long as he keeps half his attention on it. “How’d your date go?”

“Well, he’s still upstairs,” Quentin says, bouncing on his toes. “So — pretty good.” He can’t stop grinning.

“Oh shit!” Luisa sounds delighted. “I’m really happy for you.”

Quentin hums in agreement. He’s really happy for him, too.

“Also,” she says, “I felt like a bad friend thinking this before, but now that you guys are together, uh — Eliot’s super hot, dude.”

“I _know_ , right?” Quentin can’t stop grinning. He would feel stupid, except — fuck that! Eliot’s in love with him! Stupid would be feeling anything but totally fucking thrilled. “Do we have a tray?”

“Check above the fridge,” she says, opening the cabinet by the doorway to pass him the stepstool. “Are you doing breakfast in bed?”

Quentin rises to open the cabinet above the fridge and — success. “Now I am.”

She lets out a low whistle. “You’re a good boyfriend.”

Which is funny, because Quentin’s not really sure that’s true, like, historically, but — “Working on it,” he says. The magic tugs at his awareness and he almost hops over to the stove to check in, flipping the pancakes onto a tray and stirring the compote a few times, counterclockwise to keep the magic freshly flowing.

He can’t bring himself to wake Eliot up, so he sets the tray on his desk under a quick spell he’s pretty sure Eliot taught him and gets back into bed next to him, trying to read a novel Cynthia loaned him but unable to concentrate with the welcome weight of Eliot lying long and lovely beside him. When Eliot’s beautiful eyes slowly blink open Quentin grins down at him. “Hey, you.”

“Hi.” Eliot squints up at him with a puzzled smile, like he’s convincing himself last night wasn’t a dream.

“The pancakes have been done for a while,” Quentin says, “but I stuck a cryo charm on them so they should still be good.”

“You —” Eliot blinks, follows Quentin’s gaze to the tray loaded with pancakes and berry compote in a little ceramic dish and a pitcher of organic orange juice and two pale blue mugs of coffee which Quentin’s coffee maker opted to run with a hazelnut edge today and a creamer full of soy milk, Eliot’s favorite with coffee. “What?”

Quentin climbs out of bed, book abandoned on the night table, and picks up the tray, beaming. “Breakfast is fucking served.”

“I —” Eliot shifts to sit up. His curls are a delightful rumpled bird’s nest from sex and sleep and his chest hair is so hot it’s stupid. “Am I hallucinating?”

“If you were,” Quentin says, “how the fuck would asking me help?”

He sets the tray across Eliot’s lap, throwing a quick stabilizer at it so it won’t tilt while Eliot pulls his legs in so Quentin can sit across from him to eat. Eliot takes a slow bite, like he’s still not convinced this is really happening. “This is like, really good. Did you make this?”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. He’s so excited he can barely taste it, but he’s glad Eliot likes it. “I’ve been practicing these kitchen spells — really cool shit, I’ve gotta show you sometime.” He has to show Eliot _everything_ , he thinks; everything he’s done and everything he likes and all the people he’s becoming, now and always. That’s so fucking cool. “Don’t forget the berry compote. I made that, too.”

Eliot arches a brow at him even as he spoons some onto his plate. “Careful. Keep this up and I’ll get spoiled.”

“That’s the plan,” Quentin says cheerfully. Eliot should be spoiled, he thinks. Eliot should wake up every single day for the rest of his life and think that today good things are going to happen to him, just because he’s him.

“So —” Eliot pauses with a look like he’s waiting for his dream to evaporate. It makes Quentin’s heart hurt a little, how cautious Eliot gets when things are good. Get used to it, he thinks; we have a lot of good things coming. “So sorry if this is a dumb question, but — what happens now?”

Quentin mock-frowns. “Uh, we’re getting married, were you not listening?” Eliot rolls his eyes. “Seriously — well we are seriously getting super married, at some point, with a big stupid wedding and everything — but like right now? I don’t know, I love you? I’m really fucking happy? I can’t believe I got to wake up next to you this morning? I’m already thinking about fucking you again? Does that cover it?”

“That’s the major stuff,” Eliot says, letting himself smile. “And, you know — same. I — I fucking love you, Q.” He says it like there’s a question in it, still; Quentin puts his fork down to pick up Eliot’s hand and kiss it, as his answer. That seems to address the issue. “But like, are we — I mean, are you gonna move back to New York?”

“Oh,” Quentin says. He hadn’t considered that possibility, actually. He hadn’t considered much beyond the fact that they’re in love. He reaches across the tray to tuck one of Eliot’s curls back, play with his hair a little while he thinks about it. Eliot smiles at the touch. “I mean, that was always the plan. And it still is, I think. I like it here a lot — way more than I thought I ever would, honestly — but New York still feels like home, in my head. But —” He bites his lip. This part is trickier than breakfast in bed. “I kind of don’t want to rush that part. Because — look, me and you, that’s set for me. I’m all the way in, for good. There’s not one fucking doubt in my mind. But moving back east — that’s about me and me, you know? And I think I’m still figuring some things out, there. I’ve done a lot of really stupid shit because of the ways I was fucked up about myself, so — I want to be careful. If that’s okay.”

“Of course that’s okay,” Eliot says, soft and sincere and almost surprised. Quentin laughs and Eliot’s brows contract just slightly. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing, just —” Quentin shakes his head. “You say that like it’s totally absurd for me to think you of all people might have some feelings about your boyfriend deciding to stay three thousand miles and a magic clock away.”

Eliot shrugs, unsure. “Well — I get it. And I wouldn’t ever want to push you into something that wasn’t the right call for you.”

“No, I know, but like —” Quentin finds his hand to link their fingers together, briefly. “I was just imagining how that would have gone over in some alternate universe where we had that conversation three years ago, and — you just really have been kicking therapy’s ass, is all.”

“Oh,” Eliot says, ducking his eyes but with a pleased smile. “So then another thing was — sorry about all this, I’m —”

“About what?”

“About —” Eliot gestures at the tray, Toni’s plates with their delicately patterned edges. “I don’t know, you brought me breakfast in fucking bed and I’m talking logistics, but it turns out that, uh, maybe I’m kind of crazy about some things, because — you know, everything — and, and so I know this isn’t very romantic of me, and you obviously wanted something a little sexier for our first morning after — like this, but I just thought it would be better to, to get this over with, before I could fuck it up in my head somehow —”

“El,” Quentin interrupts. “Listen to me, okay?” He brings a hand to the side of Eliot’s face, smiling at him. “I want this to work. For both of us. And I literally cannot think of anything more romantic than sitting with you and figuring out what that means, this time around.” He brushes his thumb along Eliot’s cheek. “Okay?”

Eliot’s shoulders ease a little. “Okay.”

“So,” Quentin says, taking a bite, “we covered location. What’s next on the agenda?”

Eliot’s mouth quirks, like he’s mentally checking his notes. Quentin loves him _so_ much. “You may have been right about me and marriage —”

“I was and continue to be definitely right about you and marriage.”

“— but that’s not — that doesn’t have to mean…” Eliot chews at his bottom lip. “Like, a partnership doesn’t have to be — any one way, you know, I’m not attached to, like, whatever ideal of, of —”

“Okay,” Quentin breaks in, because he thinks he knows where this is going, “I’m not —”

“— like obviously I want to be your, you know, _boyfriend_ , or whatever” — Eliot can’t quite look at Quentin on the word _boyfriend_ , which makes Quentin feel both annoyed and so tender he thinks he could die — “but that doesn’t have to mean — especially if we’re going to be long distance, if you wanted to see other people casually, like — I don’t think I’m like, the jealous type. We could — we could talk about that.”

“Eliot,” Quentin says, voice a little heavy because — seriously, still? “You’re it for me. I don’t want anyone else. At all. Not even a little bit. I mean, I had you for fifty years and I didn’t bored. I didn't get fucking close.”

“Well, yeah, but — you didn’t exactly have a lot of options.” Eliot looks so sweetly stricken after he hears what’s just come out of his mouth that Quentin can’t even be annoyed. “Which is not to say — I know, I know that doesn’t make it any less real, okay? I get that now. I swear. And I know, also, what you said about — this is new, we’re — we’re doing something new.” Quentin feels like levitating when he says that. “But like, you know, literally we were on an alien planet outside of time, and literally now we are not, and also _on_ that alien planet you did literally have a wife until death did you part, sorry to be morbid, but —”

“What part of this is not clicking?” Quentin says. He runs his fingers along Eliot’s bony ankle. “I guess I wasn’t super clear about this part, but Eliot — I was dating a pretty great girl, and things were honestly going kind of awesome, and I broke up with her when I still thought you were never gonna want me back, because — because I wanted you like no one fucking else.”

Eliot’s face softens and lights up all at once, his eyes like dawn through the mist. Quentin feels kind of bad for sitting on that one. “I — okay,” he says. But then he says, “Fifty years _is_ a long time, though.”

“So this is about you, right?” Quentin says, tilting his head. “I’m not mad, but — just to clarify, this _sounds_ like a conversation about, like, sexual boundaries or whatever, but is _actually_ a conversation about your neuroses?”

“I — okay, can’t it be both?” Eliot says. “I was having this conversation with my therapist, actually, because — can’t I be insecure and anxious because of my fucked up childhood and years of unhealthy coping mechanisms _and_ also be an adult with meaningful ideological problems with the cultural assumption that monogamy is like the one true way to express commitment? Like, can’t I have this deep-seated fear of inadequacy and abandonment and also feel in my heart like maybe the truest way to love someone is to offer them a partnership without restriction?”

He looks so exasperated it makes Quentin feels deeply fond. “I guess you can,” he concedes. He sets his fork down and comes around to sit next to Eliot. “But El — is that what you want?”

Eliot slumps a little. “I don’t _know_.”

Quentin leans his head against Eliot’s shoulder. Eliot rests his hand at the back of Quentin’s neck, cozy and easy. “Look, I’m crazy about you. I don’t want anyone else. Also, honestly, Eliot, at this point I have had enough random sex to last me a lifetime. Several lifetimes, actually, it’s like — genuinely kind of absurd.” Eliot laughs a little. Quentin feels his body move with it. “But, you know, do I quote-unquote _care_ about _monogamy_?” He shrugs. “I don’t know. On the one hand, you know I’ve been in love with two people at once before, and on the other, I’ve become intimately acquainted with just how fucking meaningless sex can be. I wanna be your guy. Obviously I want that. But I kind of feel like I… am?” Eliot scratches gently at Quentin’s neck. “And after everything that’s happened on the way here, it’s hard for me to imagine either of us doing anything that would have any bearing on that. So — I guess what I’m trying to say is, really and truly I have less than zero interest in having sex with anyone who’s not you. Not now, and I really think not ever. But if it would make _you_ feel better — you know, I’m not gonna freak out if we agree to regularly revisit this conversation, just to like. Check in on everyone’s neuroses to preferences ratio.” He lifts his head. “How’s that?”

“That’s good,” Eliot says softly. “That’s really good.” He smiles. “Speaking of conversations that would have gone over differently three years go — can you imagine telling me back then you were fine with checking in every so often about whether we wanted to fuck other people?”

“I can imagine saying it,” Quentin says, “but it would have been a fucking lie.” He scoots back around to finish his pancakes. “In the meantime, I don’t care if you and Margo wanna keep jerking each other off.”

Eliot furrows his brow. “Are you sure about that one?”

“Yeah, I mean —" Quentin shrugs. “You guys have your thing, and I don’t really get your thing, but you’re — Eliot and Margo, and we’re you and me, and — I don’t know, Margo’s not just a friend, right? Not like — I don’t mean the sex stuff, just — she’s part of you, more than most people. Like me and Jules, but — more naked. And I fell in love with — all the parts of you, including — you and her. I don’t have any need to — cut that part off, or whatever. I mean, I’m not saying leave me with blue balls to go eat her out, or whatever — although, _actually_ —” He blinks a few times, trying to clear the unexpectedly hot image out of his head. “Uh — anyway, you know. If I’m not around, or if I have the flu —”

“Okay excuse me,” Eliot says, “obviously if you _have the flu_ , I’m going to be by your bedside with soup and orange juice, what kind of boyfriend do you think —”

“If I sprain my wrist.” Quentin amends. “If I sprain my wrist, you have my permission to abandon me to my pain for a couple minutes to go do whatever with Margo.”

Eliot waggles his eyebrows lasciviously. “But what could be hotter than finally fulfilling my Florence Nightingale fantasy?”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Are you gonna wear a nurse’s uniform?”

“I could.”

Quentin pictures it: Eliot in a short white dress, maybe some — high heels and fishnets, _what_? “You know, I keep saying these things as jokes, and then it turns out — anyway.” Eliot’s eyebrows shoot up, like he’s going through a similar joke-to-maybe-fantasy process. “So the protocol is: in the future, I sprain my wrist, you put on the uniform, we fuck without exacerbating the injury, and then once the painkillers kick in, Margo can go suck your cock. Is that what you wanted to resolve this morning?”

Eliot gives a real laugh at that. Quentin feels like he’s won something. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I wanted to clarify. Oh, and — one other thing.”

Quentin drinks his coffee. “Mm?”

Eliot looks him in the eye and says, without any hesitation at all this time, “We’re definitely going to have two weddings.”

Amused, Quentin says, “We are?”

Eliot nods. “One on earth and one in Fillory.”

“Right, right.” Quentin shakes his head. “God, you’re going to make me look at so many fucking Pinterest boards.”

“I’m going to be a total nightmare,” Eliot says. “You’re gonna be scrolling so hard your thumb will cramp, darling.”

“I can’t wait, babe,” says Quentin. “Are we doing pet names now, too? Ew.”

“I think we just did.” Eliot wrinkles his nose. “Gross.”

“I kind of liked it, though,” Quentin admits.

“Yeah, well.” Eliot smirks. “ _You’re_ a huge fucking pervert, so.”

“You love it,” Quentin says, meaning _I love you_.

And Eliot grins at him like the happiness is finally starting to settle into his bones and says, “I do.”

*

They text Margo to meet them at the house when she can and sit on the porch waiting for her, talking about nothing, everything, big dreams and stupid shit, friends and reluctant allies and small delights and petty complaints. Talking just to talk, to hear each other’s voices and watch each other’s faces move and react, to laugh. Quentin knows life is not going to be always drinking coffee under the sunshine with nothing ahead of him except the person he’s in love with, but even still he’s stunned again and again by how total his happiness is. Filling him up, every limb, every inch, every cell. Like he’s made of light and joy. Like he’s never been made of anything else.

Margo shows up with a pair of Eliot’s swim trunks and settles in across from Quentin on the porch while Eliot goes inside the house to change. “You look like someone who just got laid.”

“Got it in one.” Quentin grins, too pleased with himself to be embarrassed. “Is Josh joining you guys this week?” He’s still not a hundred percent how that whole situation works.

“No, Hoberman’s helping keep shit running back at Whitespire,” she says. “Also, this was _supposed_ to be a chance for us to catch up on some Margo and Eliot quality time, before someone got the notion in his head to take things in a different direction.”

Quentin rakes his hair back slightly chagrined. “Sorry for fucking with your vacation.”

Margo shrugs. “Best laid plans, right? Besides —” She purses her lips. When she goes on her voice is softer. “Eliot’s not going anywhere, right? We’ll have time to try again.”

Quentin thinks about how long she’s loved Eliot, and how recently she’s been able to say that and know it’s true. They’re all so lucky, to have made it to their future. “Yeah.”

She gives him one of those Margo smiles that are half-smirking, half-sweet. “As disgusting as I’m sure you’re going to be about this, I really am happy for you both.”

“Thanks,” he says, touched. “Oh — I told Eliot this, but I kinda feel like you should hear it straight from me, too — you and him don’t have to stop, you know.” He shrugs; none of the usual words ever seem to fit, for Margo and Eliot. “Like, I don’t want you to feel like things have to change between you two, just because he and I are together now.”

“I appreciate that you wanted to deliver the message to me directly,” Margo says. Properly smirking now, she adds, “And will you be joining us?”

Quentin startles. “Oh. Uh — I don’t — I hadn’t really thought about — is that an option?”

Her eyebrows rise like maybe she said it to mess with him and is now considering the question for real. “Why not? You’re not exactly my type, but you’ve kinda learned to work your whole _thing_. And El has, it must be said, spoken very highly of your skills with your mouth.”

“He might be biased,” Quentin says.

“He’s definitely biased,” Margo says. “But a girl gets curious. Yeah, it’s an option. If you want it.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, nodding. He meant it, a hundred percent, when he said Eliot was enough for him, now and forever. But he meant it too when he said — Margo and Eliot is a part of Eliot. And Quentin wants all of him — maybe this too, if he’s allowed. To be let into that most cherished place. “I’ll — I’ll think about that, I guess. Let you know.”

She peers at him. “You used to be easier to fuck with.”

“I was,” he says, smiling. “I can say that again with more stuttering and less eye contact, if you want.”

She shakes her head. “It’s a good change.” Quentin thinks he agrees.

Eliot comes through the sliding doors in his swim trunks — navy blue, with these fucking turtles in like periwinkle and lime green all over; Quentin loves him — and they head out to the beach.

There’s a breeze and the sky is clouding over, but the ring of the selkies’ magic keeps the water as ever warm enough once they dive in. Quentin almost feels like a little kid, only the kind of little kid he never actually was: satisfied simply with company and laughter and salt water splashing his face, making his body as buoyant as his heart feels, floating frictionlessly, easy — it’s so fucking easy, today. Eliot keeps smugly stepping forward on the sand long past the point where Quentin and Margo have started to swim. Right on the edge of needing to step off the bottom he pauses and Quentin wraps himself around Eliot’s torso, pressed against his back, feeling the heat of his body through the cool of the water, rolling his eyes as Margo says “See? Disgusting, I knew it,” not unfond, and Quentin feels like an idiot, getting a fucking piggyback ride from his fucking boyfriend, and he feels so, so glad.

It starts to drizzle so they head back up to shore, running along the darkening sand to spell their towels impermeable before they get soaked. They gather their things and start to leave, but then Quentin says, “Wait — can we wait a sec?”

Margo and Eliot exchange raised eyebrows, turn to him in slightly uncanny unison. Every now and then Quentin remembers all over again how fucking weird they are. “What are we waiting for?” Margo says. “If you want to get wet, we can manage that inside.”

“Yeah, sorry, just —” Quentin scans the shoreline. “She might not show, but she kind of likes the rain —”

“She?” Margo echoes, bemused.

There — he thinks he sees — yes, a dark shape rising, galumphing as it hits the sand, ungainly but unexpectedly fast, stopping a few feet from the three of them, staring for a moment with dark eyes. “I think this is her.”

“Wow,” says Margo, “California has made you go full Disney princess.”

“Oh shit,” says Eliot, “no, Bambi, I think this is —”

The seal starts doing its weird horking motion, neck shaking as it opens its mouth wide, wider, freakishly wide, and then —

“Jesus Beyoncé Knowles Christ —”

“Oh fuck me with a tuning fork what the _fuck_ —”

Edine rises up out of her skin, naked and tall, as ever impeccably dry under the drops falling from the clouds. “Little magician! May I make the acquaintance of your friends?”

“Hey, Edine,” Quentin says. “Yeah, so” — gesturing towards them — “this is Margo — and Eliot — guys, this is Edine.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Eliot says, mouth curling like he’s holding back a laugh.

“How do you fucking do,” Margo says, looking the selkie frankly up and down.

Edine bows her head slightly at each of them in turn. “Have you come to live as well in the house of magic at the edge of our territory?”

“We’re just visiting Quentin,” Eliot says. “It’s lovely to meet you — I’ve heard wonderful things.”

“I have not heard tell of your exploits,” Edine says, looking a little reproachingly at Quentin.

“No, you kind of have,” Quentin says. “He’s the one, remember, I was all melancholy about? We fixed that.”

Edine claps her hands together, looking back and forth between the two of them. “Do you mean to say that from the bottommost depths of despair, crushed by the impossibility of your longing, bleeding from the wound of a love sundered before its fullest bloom, you have after obstacles and painful partings and nearly succumbing to the dark call of the raging sea reunited at last with your heart’s truest desire?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Quentin says, “but — yeah, kind of.”

“The bottommost part,” Eliot says, with that particular bitten-back smile he gets when he knows the joke is stupid but simply cannot resist, “is _definitely_ true.” Quentin smacks his arm.

“Then,” Edine pronounces, “surely an occasion this joyous calls to be commemorated with a song.”

“We should probably sit down for this,” Quentin says, settling in.

“I’m sorry,” Margo says, “are musical episodes still a thing?”

“Musical episodes are always a thing,” Eliot says, sitting behind Quentin with his knees up, tugging Quentin to lean back against him, nestled between his legs. Margo concedes to join them, resting her head against Eliot’s shoulder while Edine bellows out an impassioned rendition of I Will Always Love You, which doesn’t really fit, like, textually, but feels right anyway. A song for feelings so big they could swallow you whole.

Margo and Eliot clap when she’s finished, and Edine takes an elegant bow. “ _Great_ song choice,” Eliot says.

“He’s saying that because he picked it,” Quentin says. “He helped me with the playlist, for the thing I gave you. Actually, he chose most of your favorites."

Edine turns to Eliot, eyes wide. “It has been a blessing and an honor to experience the discernment of a man so wise as yourself,” she says.

“Well,” Eliot says, “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

Edine says, “May I offer you time spent in vigorous copulation as a display of my appreciation?”

“Oh, that’s okay,” Eliot says graciously.

“Are you sure?” Quentin says. “I’m telling you, it’s really an experience.”

Eliot nuzzles his chin against Quentin’s neck, just a little. “I think if I have any more new experiences this weekend, I am going to go into cardiac arrest.” To Edine he says, “But really — that’s very sweet of you. I’m just kind of — all full up, right now.”

“The light of love is blindingly bright,” Edine intones. “I shall leave you then to celebrate your ardor in bliss.” She starts to step back into her skin.

“Hold up,” Margo says, rising to her feet. “Do you swing my way?” 

Edine takes Margo in, her — like, okay, yeah — dementedly hot curves in her white string bikini.

“If it helps,” Margo says, “in my land, I’m a fucking king.”

Edine gets on one knee and takes Margo’s hand. Margo watches her, eyes wicked with mischief and heat. “For you, your highness,” the selkie says, voice huskier than usual, “I shall swing in any direction you choose.”

“Damn right you will,” Margo says. “Alright boys, clear out. I’ve got some interspecies liaising to attend to.”

And laughing, hand in hand, Eliot and Quentin leave the women to it, running on the sand through the rain back to the house on the bay.

*

Back in Quentin’s room they kiss slowly, lazily, shivering a little from the rain they don’t bother to dry off, enjoying the shock of skin on cold skin and the way their motion and their touch heats their bodies up at the spaces they meet, like kindling. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” Quentin whispers, overwhelmed at the way Eliot’s eyes seem to light up from within and his curls glossy and tangled and his lips a little flush from use; “I can’t believe,” Eliot says against the crook of his neck, breath heating the wet skin there in a way that sends shocks all along Quentin’s body, “I can’t believe this is happening, Q, I can’t believe I’m this fucking lucky.” He sucks Quentin off deliberately, with maddening expertise, and Quentin comes into his mouth, groaning, back arching, a final thrusting moment that sets Eliot off in his own perfect hand. They’re dozing against each other when Margo comes back, wild-eyed on shaky legs, “I don’t know what the _fuck_ that woman just did to me but I know I goddamn liked it,” and Quentin laughs and pokes Eliot — “See, I told you.”

He loves having the two of them here, witnessing the life he’s built. He loves bringing them downstairs for dinner, a kind of grab-bag leftovers night to clear out the fridge, and watching Margo flirt with Toni while Eliot talks kitchen magic with Ray, and he loves the way Eliot keeps resting his hand on Quentin’s leg or around his shoulders or on his hand as if to remind Quentin he’s still here, or prove it to himself. He loves that when he remembers he promised Rishi he’d help out tonight, Margo’s eyes flicker instantly with interest when he says, “Do you guys wanna see a haunted house?"; he loves the tender awe on Eliot’s face as he watches the now-faded echoes of echoes, the ghosts who blink in and out of view and blur at the edges and transform as Rishi walks them through the loops into static shocks, into images of flowers, into candle flames that extinguish themselves into smoke, leaving behind a sense of bittersweet gratitude almost as palpable as a taste in the mouth.

Everything seems new and lovely, with them there to witness it, with Eliot’s arm around Quentin’s waist; Quentin wants to show off his entire life. He takes them to the organic sandwich place at which he’s eaten like a billion paninis, and to Luisa’s favorite thrift store where long ago he bought Margo a map, and to the best apothecaries and magic shops in the city, including the weird little hideaway with the elves, which delights them. They come to book club, where Margo becomes fast friends with Jenny and Eliot drops some niche tips for mixology spells. They watch Quentin cast a set of variations on the spell he’s written on the night of the new moon, planting half a dozen compass pieces and several more shards from a freshly shattered plate, with tags set into the dirt to remind him of what he’s trying where, a little map of intention and experimentation, the process of newness sketched out on the soil; afterwards, making their way towards the place Eliot and Margo are renting, Eliot asks him about what variables he’s adjusting and how and why, letting him spew all the theory and calculation and questions and ideas that have been floating through his head for weeks, and Quentin doesn’t really think Margo’s listening until she throws in a suggestion for the next new moon. In the morning Eliot cooks for the three of them while Quentin shows him some of the new magic he’s made his own, and the kitchen is warm and alive with the stove and the magic and their closeness and their love, and it takes them three tries, laughing, to manage together the spell for the eggs, but they come out perfectly.

There’s a spellshare on Friday, Eliot and Margo’s first one out west, and Quentin is so excited to bring them he feels like he’s walking two inches above ground. The house is bustling, crowded; Illusion work sparks along the walls, in the air, from magician to magician and back again, spells transforming sight in such quick succession and so closely that the whole house starts to feel a bit like a dreamworld. Julia shows up, with Penny and Kady in tow, and once while they’re listening to Cynthia explain some basic best practices she catches Quentin’s eye, glancing quickly at where his hand is in Eliot’s hand, and gives him a private smile. Eliot and Margo stay for dinner, and after some encouragement so does the trio in from New York, and there’s a moment where Quentin is sitting in his chair debating a second bowl of Toni’s vegan chili where he looks around the table — Kady and Nico talking about potential uses for digital magic, Penny and Julia telling some story that’s making Luisa laugh, Margo flirting hard enough with Toni that this might be the night she seals the deal while Ray looks on amused, Eliot asking Rishi curiously about his research — and he almost starts to cry.

“Hey,” Julia says next to him, catching his face. “You good?”

Quentin laughs through his aching throat. “Yeah — I’m like, too good, almost. I’m so good it’s like my body doesn’t even know how to process it, because it’s never had to before. I’m —” He shakes his head, trying to get it together before he bursts into tears at the dinner table.

She smiles at him. “It’s like running, right? You’ll adjust, the more you do it.”

And that’s the thing, right? That actually there will be more; that he believes that, even as a part of him still doesn’t understand how even this much can be real. “Yeah,” he says, “I guess I will.”

*

On their last night in town Quentin goes to Eliot and Margo’s rental on the other side of the bay. He feels like he’s on vacation, too, like unexpectedly he’s been scooped up out of his life and placed in a hazy oasis outside of town where his only concerns are kissing and eating and sleeping and laughing and fucking and walking slowly hand in hand when it’s sunny out and kissing some more. But the very best part of it he’ll get to take with him when everyone goes back home. It’ll be his as long as he’s around to want it.

In the bedroom which has kind of a tryhard nautical theme going, anchors on the cushions and paintings of ships at sea hung on the walls, Quentin kisses Eliot standing on fucking tiptoes once they’re past the door, straddling him at the edge of the bed, lying side by side on the mattress, legs tangling together, hands moving across each other’s bodies in that space between closeness and heat. Eliot tastes like himself, and a little like the mint he popped after dinner, and when Quentin sucks at his bottom lip his shoulders sag contentedly. He plays with Quentin’s hair, soft and sweet, a sensation that’s not quite hot but feels nice. Eliot’s so good; Quentin gets overwhelmed with it, sometimes, wordless with the force of his care and his tenderness and his fucking — _determination_ , is what it is, to make Quentin feel good.

Quentin breaks their kiss and takes a moment just to look at him. His lovely eyes, that dazed smile Quentin keeps catching on him, like he’s not sure how he got here but he’s not planning to leave. Quentin rests a hand at the side of his face, tracing a little arc back and forth with his thumb on his cheek, right below his eye; fingers sinking into his soft hair. “Hey,” he says. “What do you want?”

Eliot gives a little laugh. Quentin’s heart seizes up with love. “I know there are things that I don’t already have with me in this room right now, but fuck me if I can remember what they are.”

Quentin curls and uncurls his fingers on Eliot’s scalp, not quite scratching. “I meant like — what do you want, tonight? With me?” Eliot starts to arch his brows into one of his smug sex god faces, which is hotter than it has any right to be, but that’s actually not what Quentin’s after, here. “I don’t mean it like a sex thing — or, like, I am asking about sex, but I’m not — I’m not doing the thing, you know, like, _oh, Eliot, your wish is my command_. Unless that’s what you’re in the mood for, in which case — you know me. No complaints there. But —” He plants an impulsive kiss on Eliot’s forehead. “I don’t know, El, I was just thinking — you’re so good to me, you’re so good at giving me what I want. I’m not sure I’d even fucking know what I want, if you hadn’t — helped me figure it out. And I’ve never really — I don’t think I’m as good at that as you are. Thinking about, what does Eliot want. It feels kind of one-sided. And I don’t want that. I want us to be really — _us_ , all the way through. I want to, to do that with you. In every way.” Because, he doesn’t say, I think now that I actually can.

Eliot knits his brows lightly. “Have I given you the impression I am somehow lacking satisfaction in our sexual encounters? Because if so, please allow me to rectify this gross miscommunication.”

“No, I know — obviously I know we’re extremely good at getting each other off. And you’re — you’re good at getting what you want, which is — super fucking hot, honestly. And I know you like — you like taking care of me, and that’s — you know, ditto. But —” Quentin shrugs, laughs slightly because fuck it: Josh Hoberman was right about this one, too. “It’s different, right? To be asked?”

Eliot breathes in and out. “I guess so. I guess it is.”

Quentin kisses his cheek, nuzzles at his nose a little for good measure. “So? What do you want, if you’re just thinking about you? If it can be — anything, anything at all. Because — trust me, El, whatever it is, once you say it, I’m gonna want it too.”

“I —” Eliot takes a long time to answer, not quite meeting Quentin’s eyes. He looks both pleased and uncomfortable, like he’s being given a gift he wasn’t expecting and doesn’t know if he has room for. Quentin almost says _You don’t have to_ , but he holds it back because — he kind of feels like maybe Eliot does have to. Or like Quentin has to — to show this, to prove it. To teach Eliot: I have space for you. All of you, every single bit. We’ll make all the space we need.

“I feel like I should have a more exciting answer than this,” Eliot says.

Quentin shakes his head. “Whatever it is, I promise it’s good.”

“Right now I sort of — I just want to kiss you,” Eliot says. There’s a note almost of embarrassment in it, an ache like he’s not sure something that small and that simple is allowed. But he said it anyway. And he adds, voice trembling only slightly, “I want to kiss my boyfriend.”

“See,” Quentin says, “I told you it would be good.” And he kisses Eliot, steady and sure, sliding his hand down to the side of his neck, curling his body back against him.

Eliot kisses like someone coming back to life, slow and eager and hungry, surprised by his own hunger; they’re doing what they were doing before, but something about it feels like a discovery, like as much as Eliot was enjoying himself he didn’t even know how much he could love this until Quentin told him he could. Quentin feels his body waking up, thinking of unfurling one more layer of Eliot’s heart, of his desire. Eliot kisses him wicked and breathless and hard and so deliberately it’s still sweet under his probing tongue and the scrape of his teeth, a combination that makes Quentin feels lightheaded. All the people in all the world, and he got the one who is the most of a person any person has ever been.

Eliot pushes him gently onto his back, rolls over to lie on top of him, that warm gravity that sparks Quentin up from within. He lets his hands roam across the long curves of Eliot’s back, loving the sensation that Eliot is pouring all his wanting out of himself, letting it fill up the room. Eliot lifts his head — he’s so fucking gorgeous it make Quentin feel stupid — eyes uncertain, and Quentin smiles up at him and says it again, feeling like it’s a spell he stumbled into: “What do you want?”

“I want you,” Eliot says, tugging at Quentin’s shirt, “I want — I want to fucking _see_ you, Q —”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, shifting so he can take it off, stiffening under the force of Eliot’s desire and the pleasure of being wanted, being seen, “see, it’s all good, El — it’s all good, what else? What else do you want?”

“I want to touch you,” Eliot breathes, descending to mouth at Quentin’s neck and run his hands along Quentin’s ribs, and it’s such an innocent thing to say compared to some of the shit they’ve said to each other but there’s a craving there that makes Quentin shudder to hear it. “I can’t believe — fuck, _fuck_ —”

“What can’t you believe?” Quentin asks, eyes on the ceiling as Eliot sucks at the delicate spot at the base of his neck. He feels like Eliot wants to say it. He wants Eliot to know there’s space for this, too. “Tell me, El — tell me —”

“I can’t believe _any_ of it,” Eliot says, almost a little hysterical, “I can’t believe it’s you — us — I can’t believe your fucking body, your —” He runs his hands along Quentin’s skin, tracing their path with his gaze. “Your neck and your goddamn _shoulders_ and your fucking chest —” Quentin squirms beneath him, beneath the weight of his attention, embarrassed, loving every second. “You — I —”

“Tell me,” he says, speaking it into existence. “I want to hear all of it.”

Eliot scoots back on Quentin’s hips, holds his wrists gently down at his sides, just edging him to that safe-unsafe place. “I’m fucking, like, obsessed with your body — your waist — the fucking hair your arms, your thick fucking wrists —” Quentin would almost feel bad at how quickly this has veered into something dripping hot right into his veins, speeding up his blood, except he can hear in Eliot’s voice how much he wants to say it; he can see in Eliot’s eyes, wide in amazement, how much he likes that Quentin’s not flincihng away, “Your _hands_ ,” Eliot whispers, “Jesus Christ, I have to fucking stop myself from just staring at them in public —”

“That’s funny,” Quentin manages to get out, “I’m obsessed with _your_ hands.”

Eliot lets out a low laugh. “Yeah?” he says, bringing the tips of two fingers to Quentin’s bottom lip.

“Yeah,” Quentin sighs, and opens his mouth to take Eliot’s fingers inside, sucking at them, tonguing the space between them, feeling his abdomen twitch when Eliot runs them along his back teeth, why is that fucking hot? Teeth don’t even have, like, nerve endings. But he loves it, the sensation of his mouth too full to be comfortable and Eliot’s huge hands in charge of what he’s doing and Eliot’s eyes on his, dark and approving.

“Your mouth,” Eliot says, almost a groan, “your — wicked fucking mouth —”

Quentin does groan at that; he’s so hard by now that he can’t keep still, even as Eliot’s weight on top of him is keeping him from moving much. Eliot drags his fingers out of Quentin’s mouth, making trails of spit on Quentin’s face. “What else,” Quentin says, “what else do you want?”

“I want you naked,” Eliot says, scrambling off him like the idea has just occurred to him, “I want us both to get naked —”

Quentin hustles to undress his lower body. It’s funny; when you think about it, they’ve done this hundreds of times, Eliot naming what he wants, Quentin hurrying to give it to him. But it feels different, this way. He doesn’t know exactly how, or why, and that uncertainty is kind of hot, too, the sense that they haven’t exactly figured out the rules yet. It feels more like something Quentin’s actually giving Eliot, like something he can; with Eliot’s voice ragged and eyes wild, it feels less like Eliot’s in control, less like he needs to be.

Stripped of his clothes, Eliot sits back on the bed, his cock curving blood-dark against his pale torso. With a yank of his hair — _that_ one was just for Quentin, and he receives it gratefully, feeling it all the way through his chest — he drags Quentin to sit up, to come into his lap, their dicks grinding hard and hot against each other, their sweaty chests pressed skin to skin, hands gripping at each other’s backs. They kiss — mouths, necks, shoulders — going for each other messy and rough with tongues and teeth, too overheated to be graceful. Quentin feels like his nerves are on fire.

“Is this what you want,” Quentin says into Eliot’s ear, “you want to feel how much I want you — you want me to come all over you, all over both of us — just because of the way you fucking touch me —”

“Fuck,” Eliot breathes, head tilting back; bringing his hand to the back of Quentin’s neck, mouthing at his throat, Quentin feels so _wanted_ and he wants that so _much_ — “Fuck, Q — I want you so much, I want all of you, I want you always —”

“You have me,” Quentin says, palms feeling the angles of Eliot’s shoulder blades damp with sweat, groaning as Eliot digs his nails into Quentin’s ass and starts to move Quentin’s hips in his own rhythm, “El, you have me — all of me, all of it, I want to give it to you, always, anything you fucking want —”

“I — I want —”

Eliot looks at him wide-eyed, those eyes that carry everything, feel everything, pupils blown dark with desire and the perfect curve of his mouth open and waiting like the words are just beyond his teeth — or, Quentin thinks with a thrill along his spine, like he’s waiting for Quentin to ask. “What,” Quentin says, “what do you want, El, tell me — tell me, _please_ —”

“I want to fuck you,” Eliot says, with a kind of rough tenderness that makes Quentin’s heart skip even as it makes his hips jerk. “Is that — can I —”

Quentin can’t remember ever hearing that in Eliot’s voice — that particular tentative strain. Almost like what Quentin’s really giving him permission for is not needing to know. It makes him feel warm and weirdly powerful, to think — from now on, it’s all together. Both of us, down to the core. He brushes a strand of Eliot’s hair out of his face. “Yeah — yes, El, I want that — I want you to fuck me, please —”

“And I want,” Eliot says, “I want to look at you, I want to see you —”

“Anything,” Quentin says. He kisses him deep as if to seal it, feeling Eliot’s yearning through his kiss, leaning forward as Eliot leans backwards until Eliot is lying on his back and then lifting his head to let Eliot adjust, laughing a little, so that his head isn’t hanging off the edge of the bed. “Anything,” he says again, and it thrills him how much he fucking means it. “Everything you want, I want to give it to you, El.”

Eliot bites his lip. “I fucking love you.”

“I love you,” Quentin returns, vehement, and kisses him again.

Then he rises, tilting up to shift back onto his knees into position. Beneath him Eliot is spread out in anticipation, dark curls trailing gorgeously down his long chest, the soft skin at his belly moving up and down shallowly. He’s looking at Quentin like he’s never seen something so lovely in his life, and Quentin’s skin prickles with how much it turns out he likes to be looked at that way now that he can stand it. Eliot tuts quickly to get things ready and then reaches to grip his cock steady so that Quentin can slowly, slowly start to lower himself down, letting his body do what it needs to adjust, to let effort give way to pleasure.

All the while Quentin looks down at Eliot looking up, staring like he never wants to look away. It feels like a spell, Eliot’s eyes on him — like Quentin would do anything for that dark gaze that’s half-hunger, half-awe. He can’t totally imagine what Eliot is seeing but he thinks Eliot’s expression must be mirrored on his own face, because — because look at him: that elegant body laid out raw and aching, all for Quentin. His mouth hanging slack, fucking rapturous as Quentin takes him in further, further still, all the way down, crying out with the fullness of it and again when he shifts so that Eliot’s cock is hitting exactly where he wants it, deep and thick and right — they feel so fucking right together. Edge to jagged edge.

Eliot starts fucking up into him, a slow and steady rhythm, eyes going glassy, almost hypnotized. Quentin knows the fucking feeling. “Oh, fuck,” Eliot groans, and Quentin shudders at the sound of Eliot’s own gratification starting to take hold in him. “Fuck, Q —”

“You’re so good,” Quentin says, although words are getting hard to reach, “this is so fucking _good_ , El, you fuck me so good —”

“I want,” Eliot says, and Quentin nods as a filthy noise escapes his throat, hoping that’s enough for now, “I want to fucking see — I want to watch you jerk off while I fuck you —”

“Oh _shit_ ,” Quentin pants, grabbing his dick so fast he’s fucking into his fist before he’s even finished the thought. Then Eliot’s eyes are on his hand moving up and down, on his hips pumping in time with Eliot’s hips, and he — loves it, fuck, loves the nakedness of Eliot’s appreciation and the slight friction of discomfort at letting himself being seen, loves how it makes Eliot push into him harder, rougher, each motion punctuated now by these bottomed-out groans. “Like this,” he manages, “is that what you fucking wanted? Wanted to — to watch?”

Eliot’s eyes flutter shut for just a moment. “Yes — yes — fuck, you’re gorgeous like this, Q — you’re so fucking pretty —”

Quentin tightens his grip on his dick. “Careful,” he says, half-joking but only half, “you know how fucking vain I get about that shit —”

“I want that,” Eliot says, “I want your fucking vanity, how much you love it — perfect pretty darling” — fuck fuck _fuck_ , Quentin’s going to explode — “I want to watch you come knowing you’re the prettiest fucking thing — do you know that?”

Quentin — doesn’t, exactly, but it’s easy enough to pretend in the glow of Eliot’s full-throated wanting. “Yeah — yeah, El —”

“I want you to say it,” Eliot says, “I want to hear it —”

“I —” Quentin starts, and there’s a moment where the humiliation catches him, the humiliation of wanting it and of being ashamed, but he’s giving Eliot every goddamn thing so he lets the burn of it twist in his stomach and he pushes through to say, “I’m — I’m pretty, El” — turned on by the odd fit of the words in his mouth, suddenly shockingly right at the edge with how guilty-good it feels and how Eliot drinks in the sight of him saying it — “I’m pretty, I’m fucking pretty and I — I didn’t even know, didn’t even know I wanted it, I was so fucked up about it, but you — you — you make me feel it, El” — Eliot’s throat hitching, Quentin’s skin burning — “you make me feel so pretty — because you want me — you want me so fucking bad —”

“I do,” Eliot says, “I want you — Q, I want you — my pretty fucking boy —”

And it’s like that, under the heat of Eliot’s desire and his own half-shamed wish, that Quentin comes with a few rough strokes of his fist in stripes along Eliot’s chest, riding the sensation in a daze for another minute as Eliot fucks gracelessly into him until he’s crying out guttural and low with his own orgasm.

“Jesus,” Quentin says, somehow managing to disentangle them; “ _Jesus_ ,” he says again, slumping over, half-falling with a laugh in his throat onto Eliot, getting his own sticky mess all over himself before Eliot tuts to make it disappear. He curls up against Eliot’s side, happily resting his head against Eliot’s chest. “I love you,” he says, because he can.

“I love you,” Eliot says back, sounding amazed. He brings his hand to rest at the back of Quentin’s head, tangled in his hair.

Quentin feels sleepy and cozy and fucking — euphoric, beneath it. Well-fucked but more than that — so in love he feels like he’s radiating it from his pores, happy, happiness filling up his every cell. Happy with this perfect moment and so thrilled it almost hurts when he thinks about the future, all the living he has yet to do. Everything the two of them will have together. Long nights and lazy mornings, all those unspent hours of closeness and every way they’ll change and share with each other the people they’re becoming. All the things about each other they’ll know more deeply and the bits they haven’t learned yet, the pieces they don’t even know are there to bring into the light. He’s going to get married, Quentin thinks, and he can’t believe how much he loves to think it, to the love of his life. They’re going to have two big stupid weddings, and everyone they’re lucky enough to love will be there, the ones who’ve stuck around and the ones they’ve collected along the way, all those people Eliot’s won to his side just by showing his own open heart, a crowd buzzing with love and joy, Julia misty-eyed and somehow miraculously Alice hugging him in his fucking tux, and —

— oh, shit —

“Hey,” Eliot says, “you okay?”

Because Quentin has started crying now, shoulders shaking with it, breath coming staggered like he’s trying to hide it, which — why? He doesn’t need to hide this. Not from Eliot. “I’m — uh, yes and no?” he tries. “I’m — okay, I’m great, and I’m also —” A sob runs through him; Eliot drifts his hand to rest on his back, steady. “I need a minute, can I just —”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “of course, whatever you need — I’m here, Q —”

Quentin lets himself go, crying into Eliot’s chest, feeling — so fucking sad and so fucking loved, ripped apart from the inside and so safe in Eliot’s arms. He’s crying hard and aching and it feels while it’s happening like it’s never going to end, but once he gives himself over to the sadness it eases faster than he’d expected, leaving him worn out and sniffling and shaken and — okay. He’s okay.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “I’m okay.”

“Don’t be,” Eliot says gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Quentin loves him — that he asks, that he sounds caring but not worried, like he trusted it when Quentin said he was okay. “I just, uh —” He shifts his position so that he’s lying next to Eliot, so they can see each other’s faces. Eliot keeps a hand warm on his back. “I was just thinking — I’m so fucking happy right now, with you. And I’m so _excited_ for our lives together, how good this is gonna be, and then I just thought —” His voice cracks slightly. “I just thought, fuck, man — my dad’s not gonna see me get married, you know?” Eliot’s eyes go so sad and so soft. Quentin loves him so much. “He’s not — he’s not gonna be there for any of it. He’s never gonna meet you, he’s never gonna see how happy you make me — I’m not going to show him my fucking engagement ring, if we’re doing that, he’s not gonna — make a corny toast at the rehearsal dinner, he’s not gonna be at the wedding — he’s never gonna meet his fucking grandkids, like —” Quentin chokes up again at that one, thinking of all the love his dad would have wanted to give, and never will. He nestles his face into Eliot’s shoulder, crying softly, feeling like Eliot’s arms around him are the only thing keeping him anchored to the earth.

“I’m so sorry, Q,” Eliot says, sweet and sincere. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Me too, Quentin thinks but doesn’t say. Sorry for all this fucking beauty he’ll never be able to share in this one way.

When he can talk again he lifts his face. “I really do wish he could have met you. I think —” He laughs a little. “I think he would have been surprised at first, just because — you’re not really like anyone I knew, before you. But —” His throat tightens, just for a second. “He would have loved you, just — for how much I love you. And I think — I think he would have really liked you, too, if he’d gotten the chance just to know you.”

“I bet we would have gotten along great,” Eliot says, smiling sadly. “I wish I could have met him too.”

Quentin wipes unattractively at his nose, remembers about magic a second later and cleans up his face, some. “I never even told him I like guys, you know? And it’s not — like I knew he wouldn’t care. I just, I don’t know. I was so fucking sure I’d never find anyone that I figured it didn’t really matter, who I was into — the whole issue was like, basically academic, so why bother bringing it up. But — now I’m in love with you, and he’s gone, and — it feels like it mattered, maybe.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“I think that makes sense,” says Eliot.

Quentin isn’t sure if he means that, or if it just seems like the right thing to say to someone fresh off sobbing about their dead dad. It pretty much is the right thing to say, though, so he kind of doesn’t mind either way. “Thanks,” he says. “Sorry for finding like the weirdest possible way to bring up the fact that I want kids a week after we got together, by the way. We can, like — I mean we should probably have that conversation for real at some point.” He should probably talk with his boyfriend about having kids, what the _fuck_. Terrifying, miraculous.

“I kind of assumed,” Eliot says. “And — you’re probably right that we should talk about it, but — for what it’s worth, I don’t really have a lot to say. I think — I could be happy, either way. I don’t think I’m someone who gets to the end of their life without kids and thinks, oh, I really wish I’d chosen differently. But —” There’s a long pause. Quentin reaches for his hand to hold it. “I liked it, you know? Raising Teddy. I liked — having a kid, with you. So, you know — whatever you want, there — I’m along for the ride.”

Quentin loves him so much he’s amazed his heart can hold it. Words feel hopelessly inadequate for what he wants Eliot to know about what Eliot has given him, is giving him, how well Eliot loves him and what he makes possible. So he draws Eliot’s face close and kisses him, softly, thinking _I’m so lucky to have you_ , thinking _I’m here, too — as far as we can take it_.

*

So Quentin’s in love, and life is the same, and a little different. A little brighter, a little sweeter, a little — _more_. That way Eliot has of making everything just a little more fun, of looking for the loveliness and laying it out so Quentin can see — it’s like Quentin gets to keep a piece of that with him, now, even when they’re apart. His whole world dusted now with Eliot’s golden glow. The beauty of all fucking life: Eliot had learned to look for it, in order to survive. The private sweetness and shared joys that make it worth it, to keep waking up. And Quentin thinks he was getting better anyway at not blocking it out, at trusting that it was real, maybe even at finding it in places he’d never believed were worth looking in. But it’s nice, anyway, to feel that invisible thread around his finger linking him to someone thousands of miles away who makes it easier to see. It’s nice to spot those moments — a really great run, a funny story heard secondhand, an interesting thought buried deep in a dry article — and know that he can tuck them away for later, to bring them out and have them again hearing Eliot’s laughter and gladness on the phone.

After much discussion and deliberation and debate and one prolonged argument after which Nico and Luisa refuse to speak to each other for an entire day before resuming their conversation calmly after dinner like no time has passed, they launch their network — in beta at Nico’s ungentle suggestion — sending out invites to adepts they know and trust. Between everyone at the house and Quentin’s friends in New York and the first layer out from that circle of trust and especially the hedge hubs across the country Kady’s been talking with for years now, the list of known and trusted magicians is long, and the app starts filling up with questions and conversations, herbalists offering feedback on potions drafts and safehouses asking if anyone has experience dealing with nixie infestations in their gutters. It’s exciting, watching these connections unfold, seeing firsthand that people are eager to learn and willing to teach. 

Quentin had thought, saying a last reluctant goodbye as Eliot and Margo got ready to Travel back to Fillory, that maybe now that he and Eliot were together like this, he’d start missing his presence once he was gone, but to his surprise he mostly doesn’t. He’s fucking _busy_ , is the thing. With others in the house he starts spending long days driving along Southern California highways to teach hedges in Long Beach or San Bernardino fundamentals of safe energy work or offer in-person feedback on their Popper sequences; Penny picks him up to try to work repairs on warded vases and bathroom mirrors in ways he can show people to sustain or repeat if necessary, and it feels like something in him heals over every time he gets to finally use his magic for something good. At home he and Luisa are talking with Kady and Julia about setting up a system to vet newcomers to their rapidly growing waitlist in a way that’s inclusive while keeping the network safe; he’s making calls to introduce himself and set up times to meet. Sunday nights he’s heading out to La Jolla, watching Rishi coax and cajole and tame the ghosts who are more insubstantial and less human by the week, feeling the energy of the haunting start to shift each time he steps across its edges; Saturdays he’s running six miles. In hours alone he’s taking notes on different tending protocols for the pieces he’s planted, researching methods for residue-detection and energy-reading that might add data to his intuition about how the cultivations are moving under the soil, harvesting a set of compasses and plates and illuminating failures the night of the full moon and wondering immediately about what to try in two weeks’ time. Despite its seeming intractibility, he tries to find some time each day to plug away at the problem of the knife, emailing Josh and scratching out calculations and changing his mind over and over about how to optimize their chances for success.

It’s a lot; sometimes it almost feels like too much. There are moments he thinks about Xanthis waiting in the Fingerlings and the safehouse in Michigan whose radiator broke in during the coldest week of the year and the article on meridien activation he hasn’t read for this week’s book club and the three miles he was planning to run today and the fact that he should probably eat something for lunch more nutritious than a PBJ and the fact that he and his fucking boyfriend keep missing each other’s calls and there it is again: that full-body urge to smoke half a pack or lock himself in his bedroom with a bottle of tequila, that _I want to fucking die_ voice, dark and despairing as it ever was. But Quentin is learning some of the things his death wish has been a disguise for; he’s learning that sometimes _I want to fucking die_ means _I don’t think I can do this_ , means that he’s working again from outdated information about who he is. He reaches into himself, into the magic, filling his palms with water and breathing with Alana’s fucking voice in his head saying _connect_. In and out; in and out. He runs three miles the same way he runs six miles, the same way he makes it out the door — one step at a time. He reminds himself that he wanted this, he wants this, a life that feels like a life, and he reminds himself he’s not doing any of it alone. He reminds himself that there is no fucking secret; you do it by doing it. You live by living. Exactly that easy, and exactly that hard. At nights his head hits the pillow and he’s out like a light, exhausted with the day’s efforts, thoughts already drifting gratefully towards tomorrow’s.

*

“A little more to the north?” Rishi calls, not bothering to look back.

Quentin dials the Taniyama Pool in the appropriate direction, feeling his way toward the power-flow where the concentration of refractive ability will intertwine best with the more sophisticated energy work Rishi’s manipulating. He thinks, not for the first time, that he could have learned the spell before, could have adjusted it on the fly, but — it’s better now, no question; he’s working with a subtlety and finesse to his casting that still kind of dazzle him with their novelty. He doesn’t know if it’s his practice listening to the ambient for vernacular spells, or if it’s the way he has more power in him, period, since his magic broke and came back as something he’d had to fight to make his, or if he’s just getting older and more experienced. Maybe all three. He likes it, whatever the cause. “Should I keep steady for the next loop, or do you want a crescendo?”

“Let’s try it steady,” Rishi says. “I have kind of a hunch.”

Quentin doesn’t say anything, but he does, too, tonight. The not-house barely looks like a house lately; being here months into the exorcism is like remembering a dream, that sense of completeness that vanishes anytime you try to look at it head on, replaced by the palpable sense that you’re remembering something created incompletely by your own mind. The ghosts themselves almost never make figural appearances anymore. Instead, they show up as wisps of energy, distortions to the field of vision like wavering air above hot asphalt, flashes of color and light or sometimes blooming floral smells, their actions replaced by strange bubbles of emotion that wash over visitors and vanish in a second, these little shocks of grief or bizarre pulses of joy. Sounds, sometimes: children’s laughter, an unsettling crunch, the peal of bells. And while the foreboding cold that greets them every time they cross the haunting’s perimeter hasn’t faded, exactly, more and more it’s mixed with — something else. A sensation like spring, like silent music. Like fresh apples on a hot day, crisp and sweet.

They work through the loop, if you can still call it that — the shape of a broken pattern, the echo of a memory — a few more times, the ghosts twitching ever more inscrutable, the odd noises rising into a clamor like an urban rainforest. It’s kind of spooky, kind of thrilling; Quentin can feel the magic of the area shifting where he’s working it, changing its requirements as the night progresses. Something is building, or collapsing, or — he doesn’t know; it’s that fresh-apple sensation, the lift in his chest he doesn’t have a word for, rising and moving like the sea on a windy day. Whipping itself up as they cast, as Rishi works, as fragments of the past filter through and disappear; swelling into something strange, sending anticipation fluttering in Quentin’s nerves, until —

“Oh shit,” Rishi says, tutting rapidly, “can you hold?”

“I can hold,” Quentin says, even as the magic is getting harder to wrangle, taking more concentration, “do you need more?”

“Gimme a sec,” Rishi says. Quentin pours his focus into keeping the connection alive, steadying his breath to help himself stay in control. “Yeah, if you can manage it —”

Quentin ups the power of the spell, cautiously, steadily; he’s working right at his edge and he can feel it, that creeping feeling of burnout in his hands, in his meridiens, but it’s like the last quarter-mile of a run, right, he’s tired but one way or another it’s not long now — Rishi’s muttering something Quentin can’t quite make out, sounds like Turkish, maybe — and then —

— and then —

“Holy shit —”

“What the fuck —”

— the magic — _snaps_ , like a rubber band pulled too far, their casting breaking with a long empty silence and immediately after that a ricochet effect like a sonic blast, knocking Quentin to the floor. Things crash into being all at once: a light, blinding, all around him, coming from nowhere and everywhere, like he’s in the center of the sun so that he has to shut his eyes against it; a scream that sounds sickly familiar, jumbled up with the thump of three steps forward, _Daddy, no —_ ; a shock through the air like lightning and the distant peal of bells; something _big_ happening in the ambient, big like a hurricane, the flow going every which way, tangling up with his own magic, rendering it useless.

Then it settles into stillness; slowly, Quentin opens his eyes. The empty lot is just an empty lot, now: no house, no ghosts, no light. Just an empty lot, and the smell of something blooming.

Rishi is looking around, wide-eyed, holding his fingers in a basic revelation position as he takes it in. “You felt that, right?”

“A fucking nuclear bomb went off in the ambient,” Quentin says, gingerly standing up, “yeah, I fucking felt that. Did it — like, is that it? Are they gone?”

“Too soon to say for sure,” Rishi says with a smile that belies his words, “I’ll have to come back next week, but — it fucking feels like it, right? Or like — like we passed some milestone, at least?”

“It does,” Quentin says. “I mean, I’ve only been out here a few weeks, but — nothing we’ve done has been anything like that.”

“No,” Rishi agrees. “So — next Sunday, we’ll be back, run some tests, and then — if it’s really set, really cleared — I mean, then the testing really fucking starts, there aren’t any comparable sites like this yet, and so many variables to investigate, scans to try — shit, I wish West-Hex were like a week later so I could actually know for sure what I’m presenting — but what the hell, it’ll be great, I’m gonna show up with — _this_ , whatever the — _fuck_ this is, it’s clearly — something — _shit_ ,” he says, laughing, hands dancing with excitement, “it’s definitely _something_ as hell, like, right?”

Quentin laughs, too, caught up in his excitement and in the odd aftermath of whatever it was that happened here. “Something for sure.” He turns in a slow circle, taking in the unremarkable surroundings, thinking how amazing it is that from now in this empty lot might be only that. Reaching into the magic out of curiosity and feeling it again, that strange impression of flowers blooming, of fresh apples. The shape, he realizes, of hope.

*

When Diane the Traveler drops him off in Modesto this time, it’s right in front of the new branch, which — “Holy shit,” Quentin says, taking it in.

Next to him, Alice smiles. “You like it?”

In Quentin’s head the branch was becoming something that looked like the libraries in New York, broad structures of stone and concrete in smooth white with tall columns and domed arches and dozens of broad steps leading up to an ornate facade, or else taking inspiration from the colonial red-brick and steepled roofs that dot other cities back east. But the first Earth-circulating branch of the New Library is distinctly modern: a structure gleaming and clean with huge panes of glass seeming to let you in before you’ve walked through the door. It’s impressively enormous, broad and angular but friendly enough, with its display of spread-out shelves and brightly colored chairs surrounding rounded tables, that it’s inviting, not imposing. It couldn’t be further from the dull gray chambers of the Neitherlands branch with their windowless stacks and stale air.

“It looks fucking fantastic,” Quentin says honestly. “And like — I mean it’s a nice building, but more than that, it feels really —” He hunts around for the word. “Open. Somewhere that actually — wants people to be here.”

Alice nods. “I have to say — initially I was pushing for a more conservative plan. Aesthetically I have kind of a traditionalist streak. With contemporary touches, of course, but…. Anyway, that’s kind of a perfect example of all the shit I keep telling the old guard about how important it is to have a diversity of viewpoints everywhere decisions are getting made. Because I had to be convinced, but — this is what it should be, right? Something that belongs to anyone who walks by.” She cocks an eyebrow. “You want the grand tour?”

“Of course,” Quentin says, smiling.

Alice takes him through the branch, showing him the first floor stacks, limited to non-magical publications for safety’s sake; the polished white of the circulation desk; the study tables and their curved cushioned chairs (“I didn’t even think of this until Harriet pointed it out when we called her in to consult,” Alice says, “but chairs you can stay in without exacerbating pain — that’s part of accessibility too, right? Like, the magic stuff and the other stuff, it’s all connected — I’m still kind of working on that”); the floating staircase and the elevators in the back that lead to second floor, where a set of tuts to be taught when adepts get their cards lead you to an extra pocket of space containing shelves for magical browsing, and a set of reference computers to help you search for the materials you need; the third floor, entirely invisible without magic — the spellcraft for that on something at this scale would be insane, Alice must have had a major role in the design — which contains behind stacks and stacks of magical volumes conference rooms for magicians to gather in, and a reference desk with at least two staff members on call at any given time, and a menagerie of animate books, flying and fucking and flipping pages in their enclosures.

“Alice, this is incredible,” Quentin says, sitting in one of the surprisingly comfortable chairs to take it all in. Being here feels like arriving at Brakebills, only better — the joy of a place teeming with magic and knowledge, but the sense of having been admitted into an exclusive club has been replaced with excitement to think of how many people this will be able to reach. “You must be so fucking proud — I can’t even imagine.”

“It feels good,” she says, joining him at the table. “To feel like — you know, magic was always this thing that — that defined me, but it never felt mine. It was this, this gift I hadn’t asked for, this fucked up inheritance from my fucked up parents, the thing that killed my brother. Right after Charlie died I used to think — why couldn’t I have been, like, an Olympic sprinter? Or, or a genius at — at number theory, or fucking — coding, or something. If I was going to be the best, couldn’t it be at something that didn’t — tie me to all this shit? It took me so long to let myself just — love magic, and trust what I could do with it, even just barely. And now that I’ve decided to work towards — giving it away, and spreading it out, and letting it run as free as we can make it — somehow now, for the first time, my magic feels really mine. Because it’s — connected to something I actually want to do.”

Quentin thinks about them, those first weeks at Brakebills — her spitting bitterness, her awe-inspiring talent tangled with her fearsome rage; his clumsy tuts and constant fear. How funny that in the end they should have needed the same thing: to find something to do with magic that feels like it’s making them the people they want to be. “I’m so fucking happy for you.”

“Thanks,” she says, ducking her head the way she does when she’s pleased and doesn’t know how to hold it. “But, I mean — you’ve been pretty busy too, right? I downloaded Ley Line Link —”

“I was outvoted on the name.”

“— and I don’t really have time to get involved, but it seems like a lot is happening, there.”

Quentin shrugs. “It’s definitely a group effort.”

Alice laughs. “You think I built this by myself? I think maybe it’s always a group effort. Anything worth doing.”

“That’s true,” Quentin says. “And it is — it’s really cool, honestly, seeing just how much is out there, and seeing that — that people are actually willing to show up, and help out — someone they’ve never even met before, just because it feels — good, to do something good. Like, I thought our problem would be encouraging people to connect, but people are more than willing to do that. If anything our issue is logistical — trying to see who’s got this skill or this book or whatever who’s like, geographically nearby. I mean, Penny’s been volunteering for lifts like crazy, and we have a couple other Travelers in the network who are pitching in, but — you know, there are still times when you can see that someone’s problem would get solved, if only the person around to solve it weren’t three states over.”

“Would having more Travelers in the network help?” Alice says.

“I mean, yeah,” Quentin says. “We’ve all put out feelers, but — you know, it’s the rarest of all disciplines, so. If you know somewhere we can find some, by all means, enlighten me.”

Alice gives him just the slightest look of _duh_. “The Library has always aggressively recruited Travelers,” she says, in tones of deliberate patience. “We rendered their contracts void when the Order disbanded, but most of them decided to stay on with us after the reorganization, because frankly our benefits package these days is pretty solid. We have literally dozens, maybe hundreds of them on staff.”

“Oh,” Quentin says, surprised. “But — I mean, aren’t they all busy with Library shit?”

Alice shrugs. “We’re still figuring out what Library shit is these days. We’re not rebuilding; we’re making something new. And we want — I _really_ want — to make the New Library something that serves the people, that shares knowledge. A resource. Obviously I’d have to talk to the rest of the team, not to mention the Travelers themselves, but — to me it sounds like joining up with your network would be completely in line with our mission. We’d need to sort out logistics once people get on board, but — personally, waiting a couple more days on chasing down overdue books feels like an acceptable trade-off if it means we’re bringing healers to people fighting off hexes, or something like that. And I think at the core, most of us are on the same page there, these days. So — if that’s something you’d be interested in, you know. Say the word, and I’ll get that conversation rolling.”

Quentin is so astonished it takes him a moment to speak. “Yeah, I’m fucking interested — that’s incredible, Alice, thank you.”

She wrinkles her nose. “It’s not — I mean I like helping you, because you’re my friend, but — this isn’t a _favor_.”

“I know,” he says, “but — still.”

Alice purses her lips, somewhere between disapproval and a smile. “Oh — there was one more thing I wanted to show you.”

She stands and Quentin follows her through the stacks, past the menagerie, down the closed doors of the conference rooms to a set of glass double doors bearing the frosted words _Special Exhibits_. They walk through them into a room filled with maps, hanging on the walls and spread out on carefully lit display tables: old and crumbling maps barely legible marking sacred magic sites; neat and brightly colored maps delineating different sectors of magic across the geography of alien planets; maps that shift their ink with a tut to ask them a question or sing you the location of the artifact you speak; maps marking out the habitats of magical creatures and the best sailing routes for Naturalism-guided transportation.

“This is… _so_ fucking cool,” Quentin says, eyeing a topographical map of Fillory.

“I thought you’d like it,” Alice says. “I have to get back to work, but — you can feel free to stay as long as you want. Just text me when you’re done, and we’ll get you home.” She starts to head out of the room, then turns back. “Oh — I keep meaning to tell you — I talked to Benedict. I told him what you said.”

Quentin nods, throat tight. “Thanks.”

“He wasn’t — he’s not mad at you, Q,” Alice says. “He’s never thought it was your fault.”

“I know, but —” Quentin thinks of that night: the voice of his darkest self, vicious and unrelenting and absolutely nothing new. How afraid he’d been of how welcoming the churning water had started to seem, its deep airless cold. Its promise of nothing. How certain he’d been it was only his own weakness leaving him vulnerable — how impossible it had been to imagine anyone else might be more fucked than he was. “I feel like things might have turned out differently, if it were happening now. Like I could — think more clearly, or — be less afraid of what I might do, and — I mean, maybe not. It was a magic fucking key. But — but maybe. And I think — god knows I don’t think I could have done any better then. But I’m still sorry, because I wish I could’ve. So — thanks, again, for passing it on.”

Alice nods, studying his face. “You can be sorry for something and still forgive yoursrelf,” she says. “Actually I think maybe you kind of — have to be, in order for it to be real.”

Quenitn smiles at her. “I think I actually kind of have,” he says. “Not like — when we talked about it before, I think in my head it was always like, this big cathartic moment where suddenly everything — clicked, and was fine. And that felt totally impossible, which like — it is, actually. But — it’s like you said, right? You just — live with it, long enough to become someone new enough to look and — I don’t know. Let go, or make peace, or — whatever. Like you and me — it’s like, the person I am now is starting to matter more than the shit I fucked up, and that’s — good, I think.”

“I think so, too,” Alice says, quiet.

Quentin hugs her then, feeling just — so grateful, so full of love. She startles a little, but hugs him back, tight and warm, her shoulders relaxing a moment later. Of all the things he’s broken, this is one of the ones he’s gladdest to have made again whole.

*

Quentin and Luisa are at the dining table checking in on the latest postings Ley Line Link — he really wishes they’d managed to pick a better name — when the door opens and Rishi comes in looking harried, followed by a tall Black woman holding a travel mug with some university’s insignia and using an elegantly curved wooden cane.

“Hey,” Quentin says, surprised. “I thought you had your conference?”

“Realized en route I left the fucking USB drive with the slides in my room,” Rishi says. He’s halfway to the staircase before he turns on his heel, runs a hand through his hair, and says, “Uh — this is Juno Green from Ravensdale, my mentor from undergrad — I think I told you, the one who got me to look into grad school?”

“A good choice on my part,” the woman says, smiling.

“Yeah, good for who?” Rishi says, rolling his eyes, but he looks pleased. “Anyway — these are Quentin and Luisa, like half my roommates — okay, cool, bare minimum of politeness met, I’ll be right back.” He turns again and races up the stairs.

“Nice to meet you,” Luisa says, smiling. “Can I get you some water or anything?”

“We have chips,” Quentin says, pushing the plate forward on the table. “The salsa’s homemade.”

Professor Green smiles. “Thank you, but we just ate.” She furrows her brow slightly, eyes on Quentin. “Quentin — I believe Rishi mentioned some time ago that’s Quentin Coldwater?”

— _It goes bad fast here._

Quentin tenses, feeling kind of sold out. It’s been a long while since he’s had this conversation, and he hasn’t fucking missed it. He’s not looking forward to what comes next: _How did you do it? Weren’t you scared? I can’t thank you enough. You’re so brave._ He doesn’t want to relieve that again, again — that moment he’ll never fully erase, no matter how far he gets and how much he fills his life up with other things. The death that made him a hero, the ugly scar where his life is knotted around his worst self.

Next to him Luisa shifts, almost imperceptibly, to lean a little closer to his side.

He doesn’t want to fucking talk about it, but — he can. He can be here, and live with what he did, and what he can’t stop anyone else from deciding it means. He already he has, he thinks, remembering Jane’s words; he has, and he’ll keep doing it, as long as he can. It’s a lucky problem to have.

“That’s me,” he says with forced brightness, managing a tight smile. 

“You just had an article,” says the professor, “inthis winter’s _Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ , right?”

Quentin startles. “Uh, yeah — yeah that was me.” He exchanges glances with Luisa, who’s grinning, which — right, because this is — not what he was expecting, and actually it’s —

“The coffee maker,” the professor goes on. Quentin has to stop himself from physically jumping to hear her name what he did, like she — actually read the article, and cared enough to remember it. “Inanimate cultivation as a form of mending — clever concept.”

“It was that coffee maker, actually,” Luisa says, pointing to its spot on the counter.

“Right,” says Professor Green, still looking at Quentin. “I was impressed. That’s innovative stuff, the combination of Naturalist principles and non-traditional castings applied to this context.”

“I had a lot of help,” Quentin says, bashful. He can’t quite process what’s going on.

“All innovation is collaboration,” she says. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to keep someone else from getting the credit they deserve. And you’re a decent writer, too.” She smiles wryly. “That stands out, in academia, maybe more than it should. I liked that phrase you had — ‘can one consider mended an object which carries proof of its own transformation?’ And your questions about the nature of wholeness, about what it means to be mended and what might be accomplished of we expand our conception of repair — I mean these are big ideas for the field at large. I’ve had a number of very interesting conversations with colleagues about that piece.”

“Wow,” Quentin says, “that’s — thank you, that’s incredibly flattering.” He feels kind of dizzy, or like he’s floating, or — she really _read_ his piece. Like maybe more than once. She thought it was good. She thought it was _big ideas for the field at large_. He wants to punch the fucking sky.

The professor walks over to the counter and regards the coffee maker. “May I?”

“Yeah, of course.” Quentin gets to his feet, half-surprised his excitement doesn’t launch him through the roof, and gets the grinds and the water ready for the object work its magic. Professor Green watches him work, smiling as it hums its song. He pours it into her mug when she’s done and she tastes it, narrowing her eyes curiously. “That’s good. Is that a touch of hazelnut?”

“It does that sometimes,” Quentin admits. “I haven’t figured out why.”

“What fun,” she says, taking another sip. “And you’re not currently affiliated with any institution?”

Quentin shakes his head. “No, I’m just —”

“Not at the moment,” Luisa cuts in, giving him a look like _hello, something might be happening here_.

“Well —” The professor draws a business card out of her wallet and hands it to him. “Rishi has my contact info, of course, but — I’d love a chance to sit with you to discuss your work, get a sense of where your research is heading, if you’re interested.”

Quentin feels like he’s dreaming, or maybe having a stroke. “I — I’m very interested, I — yes, that would be amazing.”

Footsteps pound down the stairwell and Rishi runs in. “I have got to clean my fucking room,” he says, waving the USB drive in exasperated triumph. “You good to go?”

Professor Green nods. “All set,” she says. On her way out the door she pauses briefly to say over her shoulder. “Do email me, Quentin. Physical magic can get quite stolid in the academy. I’m always looking for something to freshen things up.”

“I will,” Quentin says, dazed.

The door opens, shuts. Quentin sits there for a moment, looking at the business card in his hand, embossed with the same insignia as was on her mug: Ravensdale University. In Queens, if he’s remembering right. Rishi seems to have liked it well enough, for undergrad. And he thinks he remembers Julia talking about it, comparing its perspective on access work favorably to that of Brakebills. “Did that… happen?”

“That fucking happened,” Luisa said.

“She wants to discuss my work,” Quentin says, trying out the phrase in his mouth. He laughs a little. “I have _work_? Apparently?”

Luisa nudges him playfully. “How the fuck else did you get that thing to function?”

“This is —” He shakes his head. “Oh my god, Julia is gonna be so psyched when I tell her — I mean it’s just an email, it doesn’t, like, mean anything, but also — also it means that I, I’m a person with _work_ , I’m —”

“Fresh blood in the field,” Luisa offers. “A promising young talent.”

“I’m —” Suddenly he’s laughing and also blinking back tears and also full of so much fucking energy he feels like he could pick up a Mack truck and toss it like a daisy. “Luisa, I thought she walked in here and heard my name and saw the guy who died, and — and she did, because he’s me, and I’m him, but — but I’m not just him. And she didn’t see that.”

Luisa smiles. “No, she didn’t.”

“She saw —” Quentin can’t believe how much he loves the words. He wants to scream them from a mountain, tattoo them on his skin. Tuck them right into his heart where all his secrets live and also wite them in the fucking sky. “She saw my _work_.”

*

“So we hit up Billings and Austin yesterday,” Quentin says into the phone, “Tampa this morning, and then tomorrow we’re waiting on confirmation from a coven in like rural Maine whose barn got trashed in a local storm? Kind of outside my specialty, size-wise, but with me and Penny and whoever’s there working together I’m hoping we can scale it up. And the wards we can definitely help them re-do — I mean, that they know, but they were cast as a six-person spell and one of the members has since moved, so. They really just need another pair of hands.”

“Damn,” Eliot says. “You’re really keeping busy.”

“I am,” Quentin says, almost sheepish even though, like — it’s true, right? “I — like it, though. You know, getting to use the thing I’m good at for something useful, that’s cool. And I enjoy, like — when we go somewhere to teach someone else what we know, that’s actually kind of fun, for me. Thinking about how to show them in a way they’ll actually understand, adjusting your casting to make it clearer or easier to read — I don’t know, it’s kind of an interesting puzzle. It’s satisfying, when you can see it — click. And beyond that —” Quentin pauses, trying to figure out what he wants to say. “It’s kind of like what you said, about your shit in Fillory — it’s nice to feel like I’m on a team, working for something good. I’m not — Alice, revitalizing the Library, or Margo running a kingdom, or Julia and Kady with — _all_ their shit. Or even like, my friend Luisa, who organizes all our spellshares, like — that making-moves thing, that’s not really my thing, I don’t think. I can do it if it needs to be done, but it’s not really — if I’m being honest with myself, that’s not what I want. But I do like — feeling like a part that fits into a whole, I guess. And it’s nice to have found a way to do that.”

“That’s good,” Eliot says. “I like — I don’t know. Hearing you sound excited about things.”

Quentin smiles at that. “I am excited. Which is like — I mean, I’m still me, right, I’m still — like how I am, but — I don’t know, I feel really good, El. Like I’ve finally — figured out to actually fucking live, and not just…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. He feels like he doesn’t need to.

“Yeah,” says Eliot, full of understanding. Quentin can imagine his soft eyes brimming with light.

“So,” Quentin says, “what about you? How’s life in Fillory?”

“Also busy,” Eliot says. “Not quite as fun. I mean — I’m glad to be here, to be doing it, but — the shortages seem to be speeding up, getting worse. Not by a lot, and we’ve still got it under control for now, but — the populace is understandably frustrated. We’re trying to keep things calm, but internally the council is freaking out because Josh and Margo did some readings and ran some numbers, and apparently the trendline is worrisome. To say the least.”

“Shit,” Quentin says, concerned.

“Understatement,” Eliot says. Eyes tilting archly upward, droll smile playing at his lips not quite hiding his real concern.

“Do you —” Quentin hesitates. “Like, is it a manpower issue? Would it help if I came in for a while, as an extra body?” Guiltily, he kind of hopes Eliot will say no.

“It’s extremely sweet of you to offer,” Eliot says; Quentin can hear the smile in his voice. “But we’ve got it handled for now, and I think the fear is precisely that once it gets bad, it’ll be quite suddenly a situation where one or two extra magicians won’t make a difference.”

“Fuck,” Quentin says, stomach turning unpleasantly as his head fills with images of Fillory as he first found it, after the Beast’s ravages. “Well — if I ever manage to fix this fucking knife, maybe whatever powers it has will stabilize things in the Fingerlings, at least. Buy you some time.”

“Maybe,” Eliot says noncommittally, like maybe he doesn’t want Quentin to put that pressure on himself — in which case, too late — or like maybe he doesn’t want to bet on it — in which case, fair. “In the meantime, would it be okay if we do our weekend visit in New York? Margo keeps telling me it’s definitely fine if I take a few days off, but in that way where I fear she may be protesting a tad too much. I’d kind of like to stay clock-accessible, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Quentin says. “I just want to see you. I could go to Fillory, if that’s better for you right now.”

There’s a pause. “Are you sure? I know Fillory is — complicated, for you. Not that it’s not for me, but — you know.”

Quentin gives himself a moment before answering. He doesn’t want to rush this. “It is complicated,” he says. “But — it’s getting easier. I’m — adjusting, or whatever. And I think — like in general, I think I’m getting better at — living with, with complications. Which — is good, I guess, because —” He laughs a little. “Life is fucking complicated. And with Fillory, like — it’s complicated for me, but it’s kind of part of you now, right? So I — I want to learn how to — love it, what it is for you. Or at least — like it okay.”

Quentin hears Eliot taking a breath. His eyes darting like they do when something means more than he’s sure he wants it to. “That means a lot.”

“I love you,” Quentin says, because it seems like a good time for it, and because he can.

“I love you,” Eliot returns, soft and open. Then — shaking himself, drawing his posture upright — he shifts into a brisker tone. “Well, let me think about it for this weekend. Keep an eye on Margo’s stress levels for the next couple days. I do think she’d find that easier, even if she won’t admit it, but — to be perfectly honest, I’d love an excuse for a couple days where I can really detach. So maybe we can make the call a little closer to day-of? If that’s okay?”

“Yeah, El, it’s okay,” Quentin says. “We don’t have to decide anything in a rush, right? I mean — we’ve got time.” His heart swells a little, to think of how easy it’s finally become to believe that’s true.

*

During house brunch on Sunday Nico says over his phone, “Yo, have you guys seen this shit going down in La Jolla?”

Quentin and Rishi exchange instinctive glances. “What shit,” Rishi says.

“You gotta check Instagram,” Nico says. “Seriously, make sure you have digital wards disabled, and search for shit tagged magic-is-now — something really fucking weird is happening.” The table obediently takes out their phones and starts scrolling, excluding Toni who doesn’t believe in social media and peers curiously over Ray’s shoulder instead.

Nico was not kidding. The #magicisnow tag is blowing the fuck up, and nearly everyone using it seems to be posting from La Jolla. There’s a handful of posts showing videos of decorative spells or window boxes growing specialized herbs or magical storefronts under their wards, but mostly people are using the tag to show people outside at some kind of apparently impromptu gathering, hugely crowded to judge by the blurry bodies in the background of each shot of magicians and hedges having a good time: laughing with their arms around each other, smiling as they point to a heart drawn in chalk on the ground, hanging with their heads thrown back off a chain-link fence.

A familiar-looking chain-link fence. Quentin squints at it, mind turning. “Rishi, am I nuts, or is that…”

“That’s my site,” Rishi says, staring intently at his screen. “I mean I think it’s legally public property, not that that really matters, and knowledge belongs to everyone, but, uh — yeah, that’s my fucking haunted house.” He looks up. “I gotta get over there to check this out.”

“I’m coming with,” Quentin says, already standing to bring his plate to the kitchen.

“Me three,” Luisa says. Rishi looks at her, surprised, and she shrugs. “Whatever magic is now means, it sounds like something I want to know about.”

“Fair enough,” Rishi says, smiling his crooked smile. “Let’s go.”

*

There’s no parking on the block. There’s no parking for blocks away, in any direction. That’s fucking interesting. They wind up leaving Rishi’s car nearly a mile away, walking hurriedly over in half-tense, half-excited silence.

They’re not even that close when they hit it. “Holy shit,” Luisa says, “are you guys feeling that?”

Quentni nods, too absorbed by the sensation to speak. They’ve crossed into — _something_ , something sparking up the ambient like crazy. Like the magic is on MDMA, Quentin thinks inanely — something free-flowing and inarticulable and alien enough that it should set his hair on end the way the perimeter of the haunting used to, but instead whatever part of his brain and his energetic make-up responds to magic only feels weirdly soothed.

“Jesus,” Rishi says, fiddling with one of his hauntological instruments. “This is — I can’t get a reading.”

“It’s not showing up?” Quentin asks.

Rishi shakes his head. “No, like — it’s turning up values that shouldn’t work together, that don’t have any known meaning that I’ve ever come across.” He turns another dial, makes a note in his phone, and tucks the scanner back in his messenger bag. “Well — onwards, I guess.”

It gets stronger as they get closer — strong enough, quickly enough, clearly enough, that it’s no mystery why all these people have come to this place. “It’s drawing them in,” Quentin says. “It must be, right? Whatever — _it_ is.”

“Like a magnet,” Luisa says.

“Or the Pied Piper,” Rishi says, brows furrowed.

She lets out a low whistle. “That’s dark.”

Rishi shakes his head. “Look, I have to spend seven million more hours here, obviously I want this to be as good as it feels, right? But — you know, a couple weeks back this was a super fucked up haunted site, and you want to be careful messing with that shit. Not to brag, but what I did here was pretty fucking unprecedented. We just — we don’t know, right? We don’t know if it’s some nice buzzy charge to the ambient, or if we’re walking into a land of the lotus-eaters situation and Toni and Ray are gonna have to come by with wax in their ears to drag us away.”

“Wax in the ears was the sirens,” Quentin says. “So the sailors wouldn’t hear their songs and plunge to their deaths in the water.”

“Thank you,” says Rishi, “that’s very reassuring.”

By the time they round the corner Quentin and Rishi have been walking for weeks, the sidewalk is thick with people flocking together in pairs and groups, walking with an undeniable skip in their step, humming and singing and laughing and holding hands. They’re heading in both directions, some sets walking away jovially, which seems like a good sign re: the whole fatal attraction scenario. Some are tutting or otherwise casting, almost aimlessly, creating little dancing ripples in the ambient.

The lot has been transformed. That’s the phrase that pops into Quentin’s head as soon as they arrive at its threshold, unbidden but certain: whatever’s going on here, it’s something fucking new. The chain-link fence has started filling with cut flowers, strands of glass beads, torn-off pieces of brightly colored fabric, the kinds of things people leave as offerings to mark that something mattered here. People have brought picnic blankets and beach towels to sprawl out on; the ground is covered in chalk designs, and in a corner a group has spread out an enormous canvas to paint in contented disharmony. Bubbles drift through the air, some spun from magic, others blown from dollar-store plastic wands; the air smells like the sea breeze, and somehow also like a rose garden. The magic here, its odd glittering bloom, is nearly overwhelming with its invisible shine, but nearly as palpable is the atmosphere — the laughter, the cacophony of voices talking fast and excited or slow and relaxed, the snatches of song and incantation. The, for lack of a better words, _vibes_.

“This is fucking wild,” Luisa says, sounding kind of awestruck. “Rishi, do you have any ideas for what this is?”

Rishi shrugs helplessly. “There’s power in transformation, right? Some kind of post-haunting aftermath is common at sites that have been successfully exorcised — you see in the research shit like psychic oscillations, which this could definitely be a form of, or teleradiance — magic pulsing out from a central core. There have been interviews where even non-adepts were documented as having picked up on — weird shit, for lack of a better word. But —” He shakes his head, gesturing to the scene in font of them. “Nothing like this.”

On a whim Quentin takes the compass out of his pocket; Luisa does the same with the duplicate he gave her, which seems to work the same. It doesn’t do anything, though, beyond spin aimlessly in wild circles. “I can’t get a reading,” Quentin says. “I don’t know if it’s that the place’s magic is too charged, or if there’s just too many magicians here for it to focus, but — it’s just giving me static.”

“Same,” Luisa says, putting hers away. “I’m gonna poke around a bit, see if there’s anyone I know, try to find out if anyone here is — you know. Not in the circle, so to speak.” She veers off to approach a nearby trio with a friendly wave.

Rishi’s already burying his nose in his instruments and his notebooks, intent on whatever his scanners and revelation spells are telling him, so Quentin decides for the moment to just walk through the crowd, observing. There’s a circle of girls and one guy braiding each other’s hair, weaving in little white flowers — where are all the flowers coming from? Are people magicking them into being, or do they feel compelled to bring them in? In one back corner someone has spelled a rock to function as a speaker and is playing some gauzy pop song Quentin doesn’t recognize; people are dancing in a cluster beside it, beatific smiles on their faces, hands in the air. It feels almost like he’s walked into the physical manifestation of baby boomer Woodstock nostalgia, only so far he hasn’t spotted any drugs — just a weird amount of green juice, even for California. He turns to go investigate the chalk-artists sketching dreamy shapes by the entrance and runs almost literally smack-dab into —

“Serena,” he says, stomach jumping unpleasantly.

She gives him a little finger-wave. “Hey.”

“Hi, uh — hi,” Quentin says. “How — are you — like, uh —” He doesn’t know if it’s rude to make her talk to him or rude to exit the conversation as soon as possible.

Serena rolls her eyes, not entirely hostile. “I’m not gonna bite, Quentin. And we’re obviously here for the same reason — to check out whatever the fuck this situation is. So — it doesn’t have to be a whole _thing_.”

“Right.” Quentin nods, trying to relax.

“So,” she says, “any ideas?”

“My roommate,” Quentin says, “the hauntologist — I think I told you about him?” It feels weird to bring up a conversation they had when they were dating, but it would feel weirder probably to pretend it never happened. “This is his site, his thesis project. I was out here helping him try to clear it last week — well, for a few weeks, but last week we thought it might actually have happened.”

“Seems like _something_ sure as fuck happened,” Serena says.

“That does seem to be the case,” Quentin agrees. “He doesn’t know what, though — and I definitely don’t. It seems — cool, though.”

“It does,” Serena says, watching a set of people playing with a fucking — jump rope?

Quentin stands there, feeling awkward, not knowing what to say. Serena looks great, which he feels somehow guilty for noticing and guilty for wishing he didn’t. He wants to apologize again, but he thinks that probably wouldn’t be helpful; he wants, truly, to know how she’s doing, but he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to ask.

She studies him, thoughtful, eyes as smart as ever; her mouth curls into something between a smile and a smirk. “Listen, Quentin — you don’t have to look at me like you’re going to break me by talking to me.”

“That’s not —” She raises an eyebrow and he stops, shaking his head. “Yeah, sorry. I — sorry.”

“I’m not gonna lie, ending things sucked,” she says. “But it’s like — I called my sister and drank some margaritas with my roommate and it was — it was what it was. That’s how it goes, right? You eat ice cream and watch _Titanic_ —”

“What is with people and that movie,” Quentin says before he can stop himself.

“See,” she says, eyebrow arching wryly, “you should have said that on our first date. Then I would have known in advance it was never gonna work out between us.” She shrugs. “You didn’t leave me at the fucking altar. Also your house is plugged into like half the cool magical shit happening in the city, so. I’m not gonna spend my life avoiding every hedge party in San Diego because I might run into a guy I dated for five months. I’m not saying let’s go grab a drink right now, but — we can talk.” With an amused smile she adds, “You can even refollow me on Instagram, if you want.”

“Thanks,” Quentin says, feeling his stomach settle into place. “I’d like that.”

“Speaking of exes,” Serena says, warily eyeing a scene behind him, “I think my friend just ran into hers, and their whole deal was a _lot_ more fucked up than ours, so I’m gonna run a little rescue mission.” Squaring her shoulders to him, she says, “It was good to see you, Quentin. Really.”

“You too,” he says, meaning it. “I’ll see you around?”

“One of these days,” she says. With another wave, looser than the first one, she heads off.

Luisa finds Quentin not long after that, while he’s still too awash in relief to notice much about the scene around them. “Everyone I’ve talked to so far has some magical history,” she says. “A bunch of people I know are here, but so are some I’ve never seen before — they were in the area and they felt it, or a friend texted them that they had to come by.”

“What does all that mean?” Quentin wonders.

“Beats the hell out of me, but — that’s what I’ve got.” She glances quickly around. “I think I saw Serena here, just as a heads-up.”

“Yeah, you’re a little late,” Quentin says.

Luisa’s brows pinch together sympathetically. “Oh, shit.”

“No, it’s okay,” he says. “We talked. It was — awkward, but fine, I think.”

Luisa smiles and starts to say something, but Rishi interrupts by coming over, looking distracted. “I can’t read this thing for shit,” he says, holding up something that looks like an overgrown calculator made of copper. “I don’t know if it’s too fresh, or too fucking weird, or if it’s just getting tangled up in all the fucking magic people are doing right now, but — I’m gonna try to come by late tonight, see if it’s cleared out some by then. You guys don’t have to join, obviously, but — if you’re curious, that’s the plan.”

Luisa and Quentin exchange looks; she makes a face like, _I mean, yeah?_

“We’ll be there,” Quentin says. “I think we’re kind of invested now.”

*

They keep an eye on #magicisnow, waiting for it to die down or show that people are clearing out. It takes a long time; the crowds linger for hours, well past sunset, newcomers drifting in as people stroll out with goodbye posts tagging magicians they’ve just met and have decided are their best friends. By the time Quentin and Luisa are getting into Rishi’s car it’s after midnight, and Quentin is sipping coffee from a travel mug and wishing he’d taken a nap. He’s too old to stay up this late on a whim, he thinks with mild irritation, and then feels a flush of gratitude that he’s made it long enough to feel that way.

The lot’s golden aura is smaller and fainter around the edges without the swirl of adepts making magic at its center, but walking up the block that used to carry such dread on Sunday nights they still feel it — that warmth, or sweetness, like an invitation or a song or a soft summer breeze. Rishi’s scanners are cooperating now, and they stop every few yards in their approach for him to take some readings and jot the data down.

The lot is dark, and empty — a strange waiting emptiness, the inexplicable sense that it wants to be filled. Rishi throws up a quick illumination, a huge glowing orb that he quickly shrinks and nestles into the chain-link fence so that any casual passerby will assume someone’s stuck a flashlight or something in there, and frowns down at the calculator-looking thing. “What’s up?” Quentin asks.

“It’s — weird,” Rishi says. “So the ambient is — it’s stronger here. Stronger than it was before, too — that hadn’t changed, the whole time I’d been working here, not till it was cleared. But I feel like the differences I’m picking up in the levels aren’t really — I mean, you guys can feel it, right? It’s juiced up as hell. I had to actively cut the power on that Goldman’s Lamp to get it to the size I’d intended. And there’s — there is residue, but I think most of it’s from the exorcism spell — left over from the pool and everything else. I’ll have to come back later and see if that’s faded… I don’t know. It’s picking up some weird shit that I don’t know how to read, although someone might, but none of it seems enough to explain — what it feels like, to be here.”

“It feels like a lot,” Luisa says, and Quentin nods in agreement. It feels like — a sunny day on the beach, a lazy kiss, a favorite dessert. That combination of something sensory, lighting up his magic, and something — more.

“The thing that comes to mind is, nature abhors a vacuum,” Rishi says. “There was this — this _thing_ before here, in the energy, in the magic, and now it’s gone, and the place has — created something else, to take its place. The power of the exorcism, that was the seed that gave it the charge to do — whatever this is. But I don’t know exactly what that is, or how long it will last, or if it’s also a Sunday-synchronized phenomenon — I don’t know.” He adjusts something on his little machine.

“Can we use this?” Luisa wonders out loud. “If it lasts — if you could harness this for something good that could be huge.”

“Or do we need to use this,” Quentin says, “to keep someone else from using it to do something really fucked up?”

“Shit, I hadn’t even thought of that,” Luisa says. “Although — god. I can’t imagine being here and — _feeling_ this, and wanting to hurt anyone.”

“Me neither,” Quentin says, “but — you never fucking know.”

“Can one of you try to cast something?” Rishi asks. “Something simple, like — Popper Four, maybe. Really basic.”

Quentin obliges, going through the tuts he could do by now in his sleep, and — “Oh, shit.”

The spell goes — not quite wild, but it shoots out of him harder and bigger than he’d intended or expected, even trying to adjust for the increased power, sparks flying in a dazzling arc all the way to the street.

“Yeah,” Rishi says, noting something down, “see?”

“Wait,” says Luisa, “I want to try.” She stands with her back to the entrance, the stretch of the lot in front of her, and matches Quentin’s tuts, with the same result — a shimmering arc of a size and brightness Quentin didn’t even know the beginner sequences could create, flickering brilliantly as it momentarily illuminates the entire lot.

“Wait,” Quentin says, blinking against the after-image, trying fruitlessly to peer into the dark of the far left corner. “Did you guys see that?”

Luisa and Rishi shake their heads. “I was focused on casting,” she says, while Rishi holds up his notebook by way of explanation. “What was it?”

“I’m not sure,” Quentin says, “it was only for a second, but — I think there’s something back there. Or — someone, maybe.” A dark figure — he’s almost sure he saw it — lying on the ground.

“Oh,” Luisa says, surprised. “We should check that out, right?”

“Someone should,” says Rishi, “but — I don’t know, guys. This place was a pretty fucked up haunting a until a week ago, and I don’t know what the fuck it is now. If it attracted magicians, it could have attracted — something worse, too.”

“There’s three of us, though,” Luisa says, “and just one of whatever it is, right?”

“We can go slowly,” Quentin says, “try to get eyes on it from a distance, see if it seems safe.”

Rishi shrugs. “I mean, obviously _I’m_ fucking dying to look into literally anything happening here. I just didn’t want to feel guilty dragging you two into my shit.”

“No dragging necessary,” Luisa says with a smile, and Quentin nods in agreement. Rishi dislodges the Lamp from its place in the fence and brings it with them as they creep slowly across the lot, against the dark, away from the street.

It’s definitely a person, or something person-shaped; that much is obvious once they get close enough that the figure is within the Lamp’s soft glow. A person curled up to sleep, facing the back edge of the lot, ribs rising and falling with breath. And not just any person, either — “Holy shit,” Luisa whispers, “it’s a kid.”

It is a kid — a teenager, specifically, Quentin realizes with a twist of the stomach. "Or something that looks like a kid,” he says, as much to remind himself of the possibility as for her. He brings his compass out and aims it in the maybe-kid’s direction; it lights up. “Whhatever it is, it can do magic, and I don’t know if this thing is designed to work for non-humans or not. It could be something really bad, using that body.”

“Maybe we should head out,” Rishi says. “Call for back-up, figure out a safety plan.”

Luisa bites her lip. “But — if it’s a kid, sleeping out here, they need help. _Especially_ from magicians. Are we just going to leave them there, on the off-chance it’s some fucked up shapeshifter?”

“No — we can’t,” Quentin says before he can think it through. Looking at the body alone on the cold cement, running through even just a sliver of the reasons a kid might have wound up here, like this — he can’t walk away from that, whatever the risks.

He turns to Rishi with a silent request, and Rishi holds his hands up in surrender. “You two make the call. I can’t be unbiased here.”

Quentin looks at Luisa. She nods and steps forward, closer to the person on the ground. “Hey,” Luisa calls, “uh, hi — we’re sorry to bother you, but — are you okay? Do you need help?”

There’s no response. She turns back to them, palms held out helplessly. “Now what? Do I wake them up?”

Quentin doesn’t know. It feels wrong to go over and try to jostle them awake, but it feels wrong to leave them here alone, sleeping under the city sky. “Maybe we’re not the best ones for this after all,” he says. “I mean none of us is like, a social worker, or whatever. Maybe we should just like, dial 911 or something, and see if we can get in touch with someone who knows what to do.”

Luisa makes a face. “You want to call the cops on a homeless teenager?”

“I didn’t say _that_ ,” Quentin starts to say, but the words are barely out of his mouth when a voice comes from the figure on the ground.

“Don’t call the fucking cops, I’m fine.”

The three of them turn in surprise. The kid is sitting up now, a girl in her mid-teens drawing her knees protectively against her chest, very obviously only pretending to have slept until now. Short brown hair framing her face, brown eyes burning with glint of fear, dark freckles all over her pale pointed face. Skinny, not like she’s obviously underfed but just in that way teenagers get sometimes when they hit a growth spurt and it takes a while for the rest of their bodies to catch up: arms long and bony, shoulder blades poking out of her loose tank top. She’s barefoot, and wearing pajamas, Quentin realizes, soft-looking in heathered gray with — it makes his heart clench to see it — a Hello Kitty pattern printed down the legs. 

“No one’s calling the cops,” Luisa says, hands up like she’s trying to show they come in peace. “We just wanted to see if you were okay.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” the girl spits again. “No need to worry about me.”

“If you’re fine,” Luisa says gently, “why are you sleeping in an abandoned lot?”

The girl shrugs, eyes on the ground. There’s a red gash on her face, Quentin sees, just above her eyebrow; it looks recent. He doesn’t like it. “Felt like a fucking change of scenery. It’s a free fucking country, I can do what I want.”

“How old are you?” Luisa asks.

“Twenty-one,” the kid snaps, chin held defiantly high.

Luisa lets out half a laugh before clamping her hand over her mouth, eyes wide. “Sorry — but come on.”

The girl’s shoulders slump slightly. “I’m sixteen, not that it’s your fucking business. But I know what I’m fucking doing.” There’s something about the way she talks — she’s playing it tough, like she wants them to know she’s not afraid of them or anything, but it feels — off, somehow. Newly and clumsily worn, like an act she’s not used to. Not like something she’s had to learn — whatever, on the streets or something. It feels kind of like if Quentin tried to do an impression of Kady; no one would fucking buy it.

“Look, you can’t — you can’t just stay here,” Quentin says, wondering even as he says it how he’s going to prove it if she challenges him. They — maybe could force her to leave, but he doesn’t want to do that. “It’s not safe, for — someone on their own. Is there — do you have somewhere you can go? Someone you can go home with?”

“I’m not _fucking_ going home,” she snarls, eyes like a wildfire. “And you can’t fucking make me.” That one feels real. There’s something ugly and painful in her face at the thought of _home_. Quentin looks again at the gash on her forehead, stomach twisting.

“No one’s going to make you do anything,” Luisa says. “But — maybe we can help you? If you don’t have somewhere to stay?”

“I don’t need help,” the kid mumbles, almost like she’s talking to herself. “I —” She brushes her hair out of her face, sounding frustrated. “Me and my sister worked it out, okay? I’m gonna live with her, and it’s going to be fine. So you can just leave.”

“Is your sister in the area?” Quentin asks. “We could take you to her.”

“She’s in college,” the girl says. “She has to graduate first. But she's almost done.” There's something piercing about the obvious faith she has that her sister's plan will make everything okay, her sense that anyone else should trust it as easily as she does.

“It’s February,” Luisa says. “That’s a long time to be — here. We can help — give you a place to crash.”

“I said I’m _fine_ ,” the girl says, but her face is a shock of pure misery.

Luisa starts to say something, but Rishi interrupts. “Uh, guys? Can we regroup for a minute?” They huddle up, Quentin angling himself to keep an eye on the girl while Rishi surreptitiously casts a sound-dulling ward. “I know we want to help, but is this really something we’re equipped for?”

“I mean, no,” Luisa says, “but what do you want us to do? Leave her out here on the street?”

“I know that feels shitty,” Rishi says, “but what is the alternative? Take her home?”

Luisa shrugs. “We have an extra room. The others won’t mind. Nico will complain, but — he complains about everything.”

“And what if her parents start looking for her?” Rishi says.

“I mean — I don’t know what’s going on at home, but it’s clearly something bad,” Luisa says. “Why else would she be out here?”

“Because teenagers do crazy shit?”

Luisa crosses her arms. “Are you saying she’s, what, being dramatic?”

“No, I’m really not, but —” Rishi shakes his head. “Clearly, _something_ is wrong in this kid’s life. That much is obvious. And that — sucks, and it _might_ be because her parents are total monsters. Or it might be some other totally fucked up thing, and this is how she’s reacting because adolescent brains are not exactly known for their skills in rational assessment and logical decision-making. I mean — I feel for her, I really do, but like — look, my family had a couple really fucked up years when I was growing up, right? It was rough for me. And in retrospect, the reasons for that are pretty fucking obvious, and not their fault. But I didn’t fucking know that when I was sixteen. And if you’d taken at face value some of the shit I said and did, you would have thought things were really different with my parents than they actually were.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” Luisa says, relaxing her posture. “But — she’s an adept, and I doubt she knows it.”

“So give her your number and invite her to a spellshare,” Rishi says.

Luisa glances back briefly at the kid, watching them with her dark eyes. “I don’t know. I get your point, but — my gut says home is a bad place for her right now. I mean, she’s not even wearing shoes.” Quentin looks again at her bare feet, the toenails painted with chipped black polish, a weirdly devastating detail next to her Hello Kitty pajamas.

“I don’t like the look of it either,” Rishi says, “but again, teenagers do weird shit. And I trust your gut, but it’s not much of a defense against the optics of, essentially, two grown men kidnapping a teenage girl off the street.”

Listening to them go back and forth, Quentin feels exhaustion setting in. The girl breaks his fucking heart, but no one can take it on themselves to rescue every kid who doesn’t want to be rescued in the state of California. He’s tempted to side with Rishi, because he’s tired and he has a headache coming on and he wants to go to bed, and he knows better than anyone that sometimes you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, even if they’re a skinny teenager on the run from problems they should never have had to deal with. But something is nagging at him, about her bare feet and her PJs. If he can just focus through the fatigue — he wishes he hadn’t left his coffee in the car — and put it together, there’s something there.

“How did you get here?” Quentin asks; then he remembers Rishi’s ward and steps past its bounds, closer to her, to ask again.

She shrugs. “Walked.”

“Barefoot?” he asks.

“That’s how our ancestors did it.”

“How?”

She rolls her eyes. “One foot in front of the other?”

Quentin shakes his head. “No, I mean — like how did you get here, what streets did you take?”

She shrugs again, visibly uncomfortable now. “I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention.”

“How long did you walk?” he asks.

“I don’t remember. A while. Not that long.”

“Did you come in from the right or the left?”

“Quentin,” Luisa says, stepping towards his side, “I know it’s a weird situation, but maybe lay off a little?”

Good advice, probably; he’s dealing with a kid, he reminds himself. “Look, I’m not trying to be an asshole —”

“You just have a natural talent for it?” she snots.

“Pretty much, yeah,” he says in exasperation. It earns him a tiny flicker of a smile. “I don’t want to grill you, I just — I don’t think you walked here.”

“Fine,” she snaps, “I took a fucking Uber, are you happy now?”

“With what?” he says. “You don’t have a phone. What kind of twenty-first century teenager leaves the house without a phone?”

“Oh my _god_ ,” she says, “ _fine_ , I got on the bus and the bus driver took pity on the deranged teenage girl and didn’t bust me for the fare. Congratulations, Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

“What bus line?” Quentin asks, then shakes his head. “No, it’s not important, because — because you didn’t take the bus. You didn’t walk, or take the bus, or drive, so — so why don’t you tell us how you really got here?”

The girl makes a noise that’s trying to be a bitter laugh but is too young and pained to pull it off. “Because you wouldn’t believe me.”

“We will,” Quentin says, his hunch solidifying into a conviction.

She snorts. “You haven’t believed anything I’ve said all night,”

“Because you keep lying to us,” Quentin says impatiently. “You’re obviously not twenty-one, and you’re obviously not fine, and you obviously didn’t walk here. But anything you’ve said that’s true, we’ve believed. You said you’re not going home, and we — we get that, okay?”

The girl’s eyes are fixed on a spot on the ground. She’s so fucking young. “You’re gonna say I’m crazy.”

Quentin crouches down on the ground, trying to get on her level. To show her he means it when he says, “None of us are going to say you’re crazy. I promise.” She doesn’t respond, but she doesn’t argue, either. Encouraged by this, Quentin says, “It was something weird, right? Something maybe you don’t even understand?”

The girl looks at him for a long moment. Quentin can see the fight happening in her eyes between wanting to resist and wanting to be heard. He tries to keep his face as open as possible.

Finally she says, “I get these dreams, sometimes. Ever since I was a little kid. All kinds of fucked up dreams, and fucked up — I don’t know, they’re like weird daydreams or something — my parents took me to a shrink but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. But there’s this one I’ve had over and over, where there’s this family that lives in a house with this really ugly carpet. Mom, dad, two kids.” Behind him Quentin hears Rishi’s sharp intake of breath. “In the dream, they die. Every time. The dad — kills them. He takes out a gun and shoots them.”

“Two little girls,” Quentin says, remembering: three steps forward; _Daddy, no —_

The girl’s eyes widen. Slowly she nods. “I hadn’t had it in a really long while. Over a year, I think. I thought maybe I’d outgrown it or something, but — I had it again tonight. Or I started to. It was the same house, with the same ugly-ass carpet. But it was — different, this time. It wasn’t like — like it used to be like a movie that I had to watch, over and over. This was just a regular dream. I was in this weird house, and this family was there, but — they were just regular people, doing regular weird dream stuff. It was — nice, actually. It was a good dream. I wanted to stay there, because it felt —” Her chin wobbles briefly. “Safe. And then —”

She takes a long time to get the next words out. Quentin feels himself holding his breath.

“Then I woke up,” she says, almost whispering. “And I was — here.” She meets his gaze, already prepared to fight his disbelief. “Crazy, right?”

Quentin shakes his head firmly. “No. Not crazy.” He turns his face to look at Rishi and Luisa standing behind him, their faces showing the same awed comprehension. “Guys, I think our minds have been made up for us.”

“She’s a Traveler,” Luisa breathes. “So —”

“If she doesn’t get training for her discipline soon,” Rishi finishes grimly, “something really bad could happen.” Quentin turns back to the girl, who’s frowning at them in confusion. “I’m a what?”

“You’re a couple things,” he says to her. “This is going to sound — super weird, but — we didn’t call you crazy, right?” She nods warily. “So — just hear us out. Uh. So there’s actually a really simple explanation for — the dreams, and for tonight, and for — probably whatever other weird shit has been going on in your life. Not, like — other people’s shit, but — things that just happen around you — you’re not crazy. It’s — it’s magic. You’re a magician.”

She raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Like Harry Potter?”

“Those are wizards,” Quentin says automatically. He is — not good at this. But he’s here, and he’s trying. “You’re a magician, and we know that, because — we are too. We’re magicians. Here, um —” Trying to think of something small and nonthreatening yet undeniable, he runs through spells he knows until he lands on one of the light spells he learned at the first spellshare, way back, writing neon pink script in the air to say _Hi, I’m Quentin_. He watches her blink at it, mouth falling slightly open, her touch facade falling away in the soft rosy glow. “What’s your name?”

“Hannah,” she says, eyes on the spell.

Quentin writes _Hi, Hannah_.

The girl — Hannah — lets out a shocked laugh, her eyes lighting up. “Holy shit. So — so magic is real, and I’m a magician? I’m not…”

“You’re not crazy,” Quentin says, a smile spreading on his face at her tentative joy. “You’re — psychic, kind of, I actually don’t know a lot about how psychic powers work because not a lot of people have them, but I have a friend who does, and he’s also — you’re a Traveler. You can go — anywhere you want, in the universe, if you learn to control it. But if you don’t —” He swallows, wanting her to know how serious it is but not wanting to scare her. “You saw what happened tonight.”

She nods, face clouding.

“So —” He hesitates for just a second. “So why don’t you come home with us? You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to, but — we know people who can help you with that, and we can teach you — magic. We can teach you how to — use what you can do.”

Hannah holds off, but it feels perfunctory. Quentin can see her answer in her eyes before she says. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he says, grinning as he straightens to his feet and offers out his hand to help her up. She takes it without hesitation, and he exchanges _okay, we’re doing this!_ glances with Luisa and Rishi as the four of them head back out of the lot, Hannah bringing up the rear in her Hello Kitty pajamas and, even after Luisa offers up her shoes, bare feet.

It’s not until they’re in Rishi’s car and Quentin is leaning his forehead against the window and sipping the cold coffee he’s too tired to heat up to keep his eyes open long enough to get back to the house that the adrenaline of the situation at the lot fades enough for it to hit him with a shock that jolts him freshly awake: holy shit, they’re fucking doing this, and for all his certainty back at the site, he’s suddenly not sure he has a clue what that means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content note:** The section beginning "They keep an eye on..." features a character who is pretty obviously in an abusive situation, not discussed in particularly explicit terms.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for a content note regarding **abuse.**

Back in Mission Bay, they usher Hannah wide-eyed through the house’s wards, taking care not to wake up the rest of the house; however they’re going to feel about their new roommate, Quentin wants them to be decently rested when they find out. Luisa sets Hannah up in the empty room to sleep. Quentin feels like he should wait up to touch base with her after the kid’s in bed, but he’s so tired his skin is vibrating and once he’s somewhere his body recognizes as home whatever fumes he was running on dissipate. He collapses into bed fully dressed without brushing his teeth, half-asleep by the time he hits the mattress.

He sleeps fitfully despite his exhaustion, as though his body might be tired but his mind refuses to rest in the face of questions like _is the teenage girl I accidentally kidnapped going to Travel herself to fucking Siberia in her sleep?_ By the time dawn is poking through the blinds he’s marginally more alert but feels somehow even shittier than before, and neither of those matters much compared to the pressing issue of _what the fucking fuck do we do now?_

Quentin gives up on falling back asleep once it’s light out and takes a quick shower to try to wake himself up before heading downstairs. Luisa’s already in the kitchen, looking about as sunny as he feels, coffee in hand. She gives him a tired wave.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” he says, pouring himself a mug. At least they have caffeine.

She shakes her head. “Too much on my mind. I kept thinking about her. Last night it seemed so obvious, like — she’s in trouble, she’s a magician, a fucking Traveler no less, she needs help. That’s what we want to do, right? But now I’m thinking about it, and — like, what the fuck do we do with her all day? She needs more than magic lessons, but like — what? Do we talk to her sister?”

“And say what?” Quentin asks. “Hi, we’re the strangers who found your sister on the street. Also we do magic. But don’t worry, it’s cool.”

“I don’t know,” Luisa says. “Maybe Rishi was right. Maybe she’s just a fucked up kid having a fucked up time, and we should have just — left her there, and she would have gone home when she calmed down. We don’t know what’s going on with her.”

“We know she’s a Traveler, though,” Quentin reminds her. “Besides — I mean, that could be true. But do you really think — if we’d left her there, would you have slept any easier last night?”

Luisa bites her lip. “No. You’re right. And at the very least — the Traveler issue is real. So maybe we focus on that first, and once that’s under control we can see where to take it from there.”

“That reminds me,” Quentin says, “I should text Penny.” He takes his phone out, stalling out while he tries to summarize the situation. Eventually he types: _long story, but we have an untrained Traveler here who needs help — you free?_

“I emailed someone I know through work,” Luisa says. “Liaison between the state magical board and local government. About the lot, or the site, or — whatever it is. To see if we can do something about — keeping it in good hands.”

Quentin nods, sipping his coffee. “Is that — I mean, Rishi feels kind of personally about it, and to be honest I do too, but — it’s not like, _ours_. Do we really have a right to do that?”

She shrugs, palms out. “No? But San Diego’s got a lot of rich people. Now that the place doesn’t give off the heebie-jeebies, it’s a matter of time before some developer wants to buy it to turn it into fucking condos or some shit. And that’s kind of our best-case scenario, so. I don’t have a better idea — do you?”

“I guess not,” Quentin says. He feels like he’s trying to stay upright on a ball rolling downhill. He drinks more coffee in the hope that it will help.

The sound of footsteps down the stairs brings their attention to the other side of the house. Hannah pads towards them in one of Luisa’s sweatshirts and a pair of her socks. The gash on her face has mostly healed; Luisa must have done something for it before she went to sleep. She stands for a second looking at them, brown hair rumpled from sleep, looking in that moment so much younger than sixteen. Unless that’s just what sixteen looks like, once you’re far enough on the other side. “So,” she says slowly, “I guess it wasn’t a dream.”

Quentin manages a rueful smile. “Nope.”

Hannah nods, like she’s taking it in all over again.

“Are you hungry?” Luisa says. “What do you like to eat?”

They wind up going maybe a little overboard, propelled, Quentin suspects, by the relief of being able to tackle a discrete, solvable problem: vegetable omelettes for the whole house, turkey bacon and Toni’s fake sausage, silver dollar pancakes stacked high on a plate, oatmeal with sliced bananas and brown sugar. Also it gives them something to do other than figure out how to talk to the sixteen-year-old whose entire life they’ve maybe saved but definitely upended. The others start trickling downstairs, running through the same sequence of pleased by the surprise breakfast spread and startled by the discovery of their guest, but while Nico rolls his eyes at Luisa and immediately brings his plate back to his room, no one seems overtly displeased; Toni sits herself down by Hannah and starts asking her about her friends and what she likes to do, which is probably a good idea that Quentin should have thought of.

Penny blips in while they’re still eating. Quentin is so glad to see him he could fall over. “Thanks for coming.”

Penny nods. “Couldn’t say no, could I?” He turns his eyes to Hannah, staring agog at the man who just appeared out of nowhere by the dining table. “Hey. You’re the Traveler?”

She shrugs. “That’s what they said. I don’t really know what that means.”

“Well —” Penny pulls up a chair and sits facing her, smiling gently. “Number one, it means you’re not crazy.” Hannah blinks, startled. “Number two, it means you’re not alone. I’m like you, okay?” She nods uncertainly. “Number three, you can do some really cool shit.” A flicker of a smile. “It can go haywire if you’re not careful, for sure, but — I’m gonna help you out, okay? Show you how to work what you can do and stay safe. You’re gonna be okay. Okay?”

Hannah nods again, more sure this time. Penny is — kind of doing great here? Quentin didn’t see that coming, although in retrospect maybe he should have. “Okay.”

Penny pulls a pendant from his pocket — looks like jade, maybe, wrapped in copper wire. “This’ll mute your forcefield, so to speak — it’ll make accidental hops a lot less likely. And it should help some with — you get voices?”

Hannah’s face clouds a little, but she answers, “Kind of? Sometimes. I get — dreams, mostly. Pictures in my head, of stuff —” She hesitates. “It’s real, right? Like, the ones that feel real?”

“Yeah, it’s real,” Penny says. “This’ll turn the volume down.”

She bites her lip. “Will it — like do they ever go away?”

Penny takes a deep breath before answering, smiling all the while. “Not a hundred percent. You’ll always kind of — pick up radio signals, walking around. But you can learn to shut them off pretty quick. And I gotta tell you, hanging with magicians is pretty sweet, because we know how to keep our stuff on lock. It’s quiet here, right?”

Hannah’s shoulders slacken slightly, like she’s just noticing it. “Yeah. It is.”

“See?” Penny says. “You’re gonna be fine. I have some stuff that can’t be rescheduled today, but me and Quentin are gonna figure out when’s good for me to come by and start showing you what’s what. Sound good?”

“Sounds good,” she says, giving him a real smile.

Penny stands up and nods at Quentin. “Hey, can I talk to you out back before I head east?” Quentin nods, getting to his feet with a clutch of anxiety at the thought of one more _thing_ added onto the pile he’s somehow amassed.

On the porch he asks Penny, trying to keep his voice calm, “What’s up? Everything okay?”

“ _I’m_ fine,” Penny said. “ _You_ looked like you could use a breather and didn’t want to take one, so. Figured I’d give you an excuse.”

“Oh thank god,” Quentin says, sagging against the wall of the house. He slides down along it until he’s crouched into a little ball, taking full advantage of Penny’s cover to stay there huddled in on himself, freaking the entire fuck out because what the fuck? What the fuck? _What the motherfucking goddamn fuck?_

“This might be a dumb question,” Penny says, “but — how are you holding up?”

Quentin lets out a semi-hysterical little laugh. “Well, twelve hours ago my life was normal — and like, real person normal, not Quentin-normal, like arguably I was having the first normal month of my entire existence — and now it’s like I’m living the Kanye tweet about waking up on an airplane, except instead of a water bottle, it’s an _actual human child_ , who probably needs, like, a social worker or something, but not as bad as she needs to not zap herself to the fucking Sahara with no way back, which, thank you for showing up for this, but it’s just _going_ to drive me insane that I personally can’t help with that. And meanwhile, the _ghost house_ I helped exorcise is some kind of like, _magician magnet_ , which is cool as hell unless it turns out to be also fucked up in some way, which I can’t even think about right now, because I slept like four hours last night and I haven’t had a cigarette in like a year but I would fucking kill someone with my bare hands to go smoke half a pack right now and then drink until I can’t feel my legs, only I _can’t_ , because I have to be, like, a _role model_ for the _teenage girl living in my house._ ”

Penny nods, sits on the ground beside him. “You know no one’s asking you to do this.”

“Okay and that’s another fucking thing,” Quentin bursts out, “like — am I doing the right thing here? Am I, am I helping someone who needs to be helped because I’m around and I give a shit? Or is that, like, the story I’m telling myself to cover for the fact that this is just the same fucking white knight complex that got my ass fucking killed, and I actually haven’t moved on from that at all?”

“I can’t answer that for you,” Penny says.

Quentin buries his face in his hands. “I know. Sorry. I know.”

“If it makes you feel any better, though,” Penny says, “in your shoes I’d be doing the same thing.” He pauses. “Although my white knight savior complex also got my ass killed, so I don’t know if it should.”

Quentin has to laugh at that. “This is insane. I mean this is fucking insane.”

“What would plan B be for this kid?” Penny asks.

Quentin tries to think. “I really don’t know. I think — I mean we can’t force her to go home. Even if — that was a good idea. So — I guess it’s plan A for now.” He hangs his head. “It’s like — this is fucking stupid, and I feel like an asshole even thinking it while meanwhile we’re dealing with like, a fucking runaway freaking out that her magic might kill her, but — it’s like I’d finally figured it out, you know? My whole life, I had just — sucked at being a person, and I finally managed to kind of get the hang of it. Of how to fucking — live. And I guess I thought I might get to actually enjoy that, for a while, before some new completely fucked up thing showed up for me to deal with, but —” He holds his hands out, cupping his palms. He’s so stressed that it takes a moment to invite the magic in; he can feel the block he’s putting up, his flow too tangled to work coherently until he manages to shove the other shit away long enough to connect and let the ambient shape itself into something else. Filling his hands with water, in and out. One breath after another. He remembers Jane saying: You already are. “But I guess that’s life.”

Penny raises an eyebrow. “An endless parade of fucked up things shoving themselves at you until you die?”

Quentin smiles wryly. “Something like that.”

“And yet here we are,” says Penny.

Quentin lifts his eyes. Through the bars on the porch railing, he can see the waves of the bay crashing on shore in their steady churn. “I wouldn’t give it up for anything.” He pushes up to his feet. “So I guess I better go inside.”

Penny rises to join him. “You should know — the pendant I gave her, it’s good shit, but it’s not foolproof. I’m gonna teach her as fast as I can, but you should check in with Alice.”

“Alice?” Quentin says, surprised.

“The Library’s been recruiting Travelers for centuries,” Penny says. “And they’ve got access to all kind of super juiced-up shit most magicians can’t even dream of. They might have something that can help. And with new people in charge, they might actually be willing to help.”

“That’s a good call,” Quentin says. He needs to text Alice; he needs to talk to Luisa about figuring out Hannah’s clothes, and probably whatever her friend in government said about the lot; he needs to talk to Julia to try to inject some of her warm certainty into his head; he needs to figure out the fucking knife still, somehow; he needs to talk to _Eliot_ , Jesus Christ, New York is clearly not happening this weekend; he needs — 

— _I want to fucking die_ —

— to breathe. Keep breathing, and — and he’ll figure something out. “Thanks. For all of this.”

Penny nods, studying his face. “What I said to the kid — you’re not alone in this either, man.”

“Can I, like — is it cool if we —” Quentin holds his arms out awkwardly.

Penny rolls his eyes a little, but he smiles when he says, “Yeah, man, we can hug it out.”

He gives Quentin an actually pretty cozy squeeze, firm and sure as if to say: you’re not alone. I mean it. Quentin squeezes him back, to remind himself it’s true. Then Penny blips out and is gone.

*

Alice, god fucking bless her, drops whatever else she had going on to come by with Diane in tow. Apparently at some point the library developed a technique for making ink spells temporary, so Diane applies some kind of anti-Traveling design to Hannah’s wrist with a fine-pointed applicator while Quentin watches from the edge of the living room, feeling compelled to stick close by even though he’s objectively useless here.

“The spell should last about a week before it starts to fade,” Alice says. “That should be enough time for her to develop some control, at least, working one-on-one. Do you need one of my people on that?”

“I guess check with Penny?” Quentin says. “I’m fine with him if he’s fine with it, but I don’t want to like, totally derail his life because I made a questionable call in the middle of the night.” He checks his phone screen, even though it’s on vibrate. Eliot hasn’t called back, or responded to the text Quentin sent — _hey, i’m sorry, can’t come to the city this weekend after all. kind of a long story, call me when you can? love you._ He’s not nervous, exactly, but — he just really wants to talk to Eliot, is all. At some point in this bizarro world sitcom episode his life has suddenly become, he would like to hear his boyfriend’s voice.

“It’s weird,” Alice says, eyes on Diane as she works.

Quentin snorts. “That’s an understatement.”

“No, I mean —” She purses her lips, her sharp eyes narrowing. “The Library has a huge repository of information on Travelers. It had been sitting kind of neglected, honestly, and now I’m thinking we should start getting it out there — that stuff’s a real safety hazard. But it’s got a register of every Traveler ever born — and not just on Earth, across all the worlds we keep records on — along with the date of their first Travel. Psychic powers almost always manifest early — it’s not uncommon to see it in little kids, although there’s typically a regression phase before it comes back in their late teens — but Traveling?” She turns to Quentin. “It’s never appeared earlier than their twenties. The earliest one we have is twenty years old, four months.”

Quentin studies Hannah, giggling a little at the tickle of Diane’s ink. She’s so fucking _young._ “So what are you saying? She’s some kind of prodigy?”

“It’s possible,” Alice says, but she sounds doubtful. “Or — something awakened it. Activated it earlier than normal.”

“The exorcism,” Quentin says, realizing. “The site, when we went there yesterday — magicians were flocking to it. The ambient was the strongest I’ve ever felt it outside of Fillory. You think it could have — triggered some kind of magical puberty?”

“Maybe,” Alice says. “I’m just speculating.”

“I’d trust your speculations above most people’s graduate theses,” Quentin says. Alice allows herself a small smile. “Speaking of, I’ll pass that on to Rishi. Maybe he can use it in his.” At Alice’s inquisitive look he clarifies, “My friend — the hauntologist, the one who cleared the site. He’s back out there now, seeing what’s going on today.”

Alice nods. “Keep me updated. I’m curious about what he’ll find. Localized events like this — they’re rare, and — kind of fascinating, honestly.”

“I will,” Quentin promises.

Diane wraps some clear film around Hannah’s wrist. “So keep that dry for another four hours at least, okay? Or it won’t work as well.”

Hannah nods obediently, studying the design. “It’s pretty.” Diane smiles at her.

“Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” Quentin asks. He trusts Alice to tell him no if that’s what she really thinks.

Alice doesn’t say no; for a moment she doesn’t say anything. “I think she’s in good hands.” Quentin takes a deep breath, then another — in and out; in and out — willing himself to believe it.

*

Eliot calls just as Quentin’s sitting down with Luisa to regroup after they’ve handed Hannah his laptop worked up with a shit-ton of privacy wards to keep herself occupied as they figure out what the fuck to do now.

“I’m so sorry,” Quentin says, heart leaping at the name on the screen, “do you mind if I just real quick —”

“Go,” Luisa says, waving him off, “we’re stressed, you deserve it.”

Quentin nods a breathless thanks and takes the stairs two at a time to shut himself in his room with Eliot’s voice. “El — hi, hello, thanks for calling.”

“Hey,” El says, softly concerned. “What’s going on? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, things are okay,” Quentin says, because what the fuck does that even mean right now, “I just, uh — I’ve kind of accidentally become a foster dad?”

“You,” says Eliot, “sorry — _what?_ ”

Quentin catches him up on the past — Jesus fucking Christ, has it only been twelve hours? He feels like he’s aged fifteen years — moving quickly from the unexpected ebullience at the empty lot through Hannah in her bare feet and Hello Kitty pajamas to calling in back-up to try to control her dangerous power. “And now she’s — living here, I guess,” he finishes, “or staying until — who fucking knows what, I know there are like six of us here but I just feel like — I don’t know, she’s a kid having a completely insane time and probably not doing too great with authority figures before that. This weekend seems kind of soon for me to bounce if we want her to feel — safe, or whatever. Trust us.”

“Of course,” Eliot says, gentle and much more sure than Quentin feels about anything right now.

“And then it’s like — should she trust us? Is that like, good for her, to just go along with a bunch of strangers who say they’ve got magic? Would I want her to do that, if she were —” Quentin bites back _my daughter_. “Like, what would someone who cares about her want, and what right do I have to care about her? We should probably try to call her sister at some point, although I have no idea what the fuck we’re going to say — and also, like, she’s fucking sixteen, who even knows what her sister actually told her or what she can do — who the fuck knows anything about this kid? I mean —” Quentin bites the inside of his cheek. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Yes.” Eliot’s reply is immediate, decisive. Quentin wasn’t really expecting him to say anything else, but his shoulders ease anyway, hearing it. “Absolutely. Look — nothing you’ve done is permanent, right? Except tell her about magic, but magic found her first, so it’s not like you really had a choice on that one. You don’t need to decide the course of her entire life today. You can figure it out one day at a time. And what were you going to do? Just leave her there?”

Quentin flashes back to last night: her chipped nail polish, her clumsy defiance. “No. I couldn’t do that.” Which he knew, but — saying it out loud helps. Saying it to Eliot helps. “Thanks. It — you’re right. And I, I knew that, but — thanks for saying it.” He bites at a hangnail. “I wish I could see you.” For the first time since Eliot left, Quentin misses him terribly.

“Me too,” Eliot says. His lovely complicated smile, his eyes certain and shining. “But we will. When we can. We have time.”

“Yeah.” Quentin nods to himself. They have time, he reminds himself. They don’t need to rush anything. “So now we need to figure out, like — what to _do_ with her, I mean, right now she’s hanging in her room messing around on my laptop, which is fine for now, but not exactly a sustainable situation. Obviously we want to help her develop her magic but I’m so fucking fried I’m not sure I trust myself to cast a fucking first-year card swap spell at the moment, much less teach someone anything, and I don’t know what, like, what do you even do with a fucking sixteen-year-old? She’s not, like, a toddler, she doesn’t need to be constantly entertained, but — I don’t know, it feels pretty shitty to bring this kid in and then just leave her to her own devices all day.”

“Oh,” Eliot says, “are the schools in California on a break?”

Fuck his life, Quentin thinks, pulse picking up again. “Shit,” he says out loud, “uh, I have to — I’ll call you back, okay? I love you.” He hangs up before he can hear Eliot say it back because _fucking fucking motherfucking fuck_.

He nearly falls over himself racing down the stairs to find Luisa at the table, eyebrows rising presumably at his general air of dishevelment and panic. “We forgot about _school_.”

Luisa’s eyes go huge. “Oh, shit.”

“So we should — we should talk to her about that, right?” Quentin says, nodding like he can convince himself he’s right.

“Uh, yeah,” Luisa says, “we should definitely talk to her about that — oh my god, I can’t believe we’ve been freaking out so much about her powers that we forgot fucking _school_ —”

They head back up to her closed bedroom door and pause. “So,” Luisa says, sounding as unaccountably nervous as he feels, “in that other life where you like successfully raised a child to adulthood, how did you approach conversations like this?”

“I didn’t really — have a strategy,” Quentin says, trying to remember. “I mean, they didn’t exactly have school in the Fillorian backwoods, or, or homework, or —” Or college applications, he thinks with mounting dread, or driver’s ed, or the SAT, or — “Some things were kind of… simplified.”

“Well, in that case — here goes nothing,” Luisa says, and knocks on the door.

Hannah greets them with a small smile and a friendly wave. That’s gotta be a good sign, right? “Hi, guys. Are we going to do magic now?”

Quentin and Luisa exchange quick glances. “Uh, not exactly,” Quentin says, trying to sound — what? How the fuck does he want to sound? Authoritative? Cheerful? Non-threatening? Like a fucking dad, is the real answer, but what does that mean? “We wanted to — to check in about — your education. Like, your regular education. Like — like school.”

“Since, you know,” Luisa breaks in, “today’s kind of — different —”

“A special occasion,” Quentin says.

“— very special — and that’s great,” Luisa says, “but — _of course_ , tomorrow you’ll be going back to school, and we just — before anything else, we just wanted to figure out how — how to do that smoothly —”

“The logistics,” Quentin says, grateful to be able to jump on her lead, “like — like where you go, so we know how you’re — getting there, and if you need a ride, or whatever — you know. Just so we’re all clear.” That was — fine, probably. He attempts a smile.

Hannah frowns at them. “Why do I need school if I’m going to be a magician?”

So, this he didn’t anticipate. “Because,” he says, trying to put a little laugh into it, like, _ha ha, what a ridiculous question none of us are really taking seriously, definitely not the child I kidnapped_ , “school is important. It’s — you have to, to learn things, like —” Desperately he looks at Luisa for assistance.

“Like languages,” she offers, “like, _so_ much magic is in different languages, and if you’ve — if you’ve studied one, it’s easier to learn the others — not to mention, uh —”

“Math,” Quentin says, “magic is actually, like, hugely mathematical, you need to know a lot of shit about, like, vectors, and modular arithmetic, and — and _definitely_ geometry, especially if you want to write your own spells —”

Hannah looks skeptical. “Can’t you just teach me that stuff? Why do I have to learn world history?”

“Uh, because,” Quentin says, “because it’s not enough to just — _do_ magic, you need to — to understand your, your context, to make good choices, you know — with great power, comes great responsibility —”

“Did you just quote one of the Spider-Man movies at me?” says Hannah.

“No — yes,” Quentin says, “but not — it’s a good point, and it’s — true. And knowing about history — helps you with that. Because it… does.”

“Plus,” Luisa says, “a lot of jobs you can get as a magician want people who are well-rounded — like, I think every job I’ve ever had has asked at _least_ for a high school diploma.”

“What do you guys do?” Hannah asks.

Quentin tries to sound positive as he says, “I’m kind of — between things, as I like, figure out my path…”

“ _I_ ,” says Luisa, “work for climate justice.”

“So,” Hannah says, “shouldn’t you be like… at your job?”

“I totally agree,” Luisa says, “but unfortunately the magic-related funding board of the state of California has some — different opinions, about saving the planet, so we’re kind of — on a break.”

Hannah looks less than convinced. “Doesn’t really seem like school is helping you two a lot.”

“Look, bottom line is, you have to go to high school,” Quentin bursts out in desperation, “and if you don’t, we’re not teaching you magic.” She scowls at him, opening her mouth to say something, but he holds a hand up and goes on, “And it’s — high school sucks, a lot, most of the time, and I get that, and I wish there was a better system, but there’s not right now, and — and you need to learn the things you learn there, even the kind of stupid, bullshit ones, because — because magic can’t be all that you are. It needs to be — part of you, balanced out by other parts, or it’s going to eat you alive. I’ve seen it happen, okay? You hang around with magicians, you meet some pretty fucked up people who got so convinced that magic was _it_ for them that they forgot about all the other parts of being a person. So — you’re going to go to school, and, and you’re going to do your homework each day, and then — uh, after someone’s checked it” — he glances at Luisa for quick confirmation — “then we can do magic. Okay?”

Hannah purses her lips; Quentin tries not to react. For a long moment he thinks she’s about to really make a fight of it, but then she shrugs. “Fine.”

It’s not _Wow, Quentin, what a great point you’ve made about the value of a holistic education even imperfectly delivered, thank you for imparting a meaningful lesson to me today,_ but — she doesn’t sound mad at him, so — cool. And even if she were, like — she has to go to fucking school. “Okay,” he says. “Glad we’re clear.”

“What am I gonna wear?” she asks. He thinks she’s being surly until he catches sight of her face, eyes flickering with anxiety, and his impatience melts away into guilt at the fact that her entire already fucked up life has been turned upside down in the past twenty-four hours.

“We can go shopping.” Luisa says. “Get you some clothes.”

“What about my books?” Hannah says. “My teachers are gonna kill me if I tell them I’ve lost all my notes.”

It is so absurd that in the space of a minute she’s pivoted from _fuck school, I have magic_ to _my teachers are gonna kill me_ that Quentin almost laughs, then almost starts to cry. She’s so fucking young. “We can get them,” he says, before he has the chance to really think it through.

“You can?” says Hannah.

“We can?” says Luisa.

“Yeah.” Quentin says, avoiding Luisa’s eyes, “yeah, I mean — we’re magicians, right? We can…” He can’t quite say out loud what he’s about to promise her they’ll do, which is not a great sign. But she’s so small and so fucking alone. “Do you know, your parents — or whoever’s back at — at the place you left, do you know when they’re home?”

*

“This is insane,” Luisa says from the driver’s seat.

“You’ve mentioned that,” Quentin says. They’re parked on a street in La Jolla, a few blocks from the address Hannah gave them. At the faintest edge of his extrasensory awareness, he can feel the warm hum of the magic from the empty lot burbling in its odd patterns.

“I know,” she says, “but I just wanted to make sure I got it out one more time before we went in.”

“You don’t have to come with me,” he says. “It was my — dumb fucking idea, because I couldn’t handle the idea that a sixteen-year-old might need to get some new school supplies.”

“Yes I do,” Luisa says. “And that’s not why.”

She’s right, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. “Are we doing the right thing?”

“Like, in general?” Luisa says. “Or the breaking-and-entering part?”

“All of the above.”

She shrugs. “I don’t fucking know anymore, and I’m too exhausted at this point to worry about it. I’m not sorry about it, though.” Quentin nods, doesn’t say anything. Softening, she says, “Hey, I thought you were kind of great back there.”

Quentin laughs hollowly. “When I like, blackmailed her with her own magic to get her to finish out the tenth grade?”

“You set a boundary,” Luisa says. “Kids need those. And on some level, I think she knows you did it because you gave a shit.”

Quentin’s not convinced. “Alright, we should have plenty of time, but — let’s get this over with.” Luisa nods, and together they step out of the car.

The house is nicer than Quentin expected, which — was stupid of him, in retrospsect; it’s not like there’s an income cap on fucked-up parenting. Expensive-looking abstract art hangs on the walls; through one of the doorways on the ground floor, he sees the shining black slant of a grand piano. The floors are covered in plush white carpeting, the kind of thing that draws attention to the money it takes to keep it looking this clean. It reminds him more than a little of Julia’s house, when they were kids.

Upstairs they quickly find the room that must be Hannah’s — an unremarkable teenage girl’s bedroom: bright polka-dot bedspread, fluffy cushions leaning against the white headboard, walls covered in unframed posters of bands Quentin’s never heard of and, kind of awesomely, a huge black and white picture of Kurt Cobain smoking while holding his guitar. Luisa rifles through her closet and drawers — just being this close to a teenage girl’s underwear drawer makes Quentin want to put himself in jail — while Quentin stacks up the papers and books strewn atop her desk and unplugs the phone with its bunny-eared glitter case, the two of them working temporary resizing spells for ease of transport.

“Look at this,” Luisa says, a note of sadness in her voice.

Quentin crosses the room, tiptoeing even though no one’s home. The house feels — not haunted, exactly, but — he wants to get out of here quick. “What’s up?”

Luisa gestures at the back corner of the closet. An acoustic guitar, Quentin sees, broken. More than broken: destroyed, neck snapped in two, wooden body smashed into ugly pieces, strings flailing askew. The kind of damage that doesn’t happen by accident. Instinctively he reaches into its magic, just to catch a whisper, and — if he was looking for some final confirmation that his instincts were right, the sorrowful shudder he receives is probably as good as he’s going to get.

“She didn’t say anything about a guitar,” Quentin says.

Luisa shrugs. “As far as she knows, she can’t play it anymore. Why would she want a broken guitar?”

“Yeah, well,” Quentin says, gingerly lifting the pieces in the net of his magic and floating them over to where he can reach, “it’s not going to stay broken for long.”

*

After they run the Illusion spell Cynthia suggested that should keep the family from noticing anything amiss for a long while, Quentin drops Luisa off at an apothecary on the way home to pick up some ingredients that need to be fresh-brewed so they can re-up the house’s protective wards. As far as Hannah knows her parents aren’t magicians, and neither Quentin nor Luisa found or felt anything at the house to suggest otherwise, but — never hurts to be extra careful after you’ve committed a felony against people you have reason to believe are not exactly pillars of decency themselves. He hops out himself for a cup of coffee, taking a few bracing sips in the car. This day has felt seven hundred years long, and his life has taken a turn for the freshly nuts, but — the hardest parts are over. Hannah’s safe; she’s going to go school, and she doesn’t hate them for it; he’ll give her all her stuff and fix her guitar and talk to Cynthia about whatever the fuck they might need to show the school to keep them from asking unfortunate questions and Toni will make dinner and everyone will go to bed and in the morning things will be — weird, but fine. It’s fine. He’s fine. He turns the key in the ignition and turns the radio on to some Spanish pop station blaring something bright and peppy and he feels okay.

The house keeps its warded facade up past the point in the path where his presence usually trips it into revealing the familiar mint-green wood and chirping windchime. That’s — not a great sign. Worse sign: there’s a young woman standing out front, arms crossed, brows knit furiously, tapping her foot. A woman, Quentin notices with a turn of his stomach that makes him regret the extra caffeine, with Hannah’s same pointed face and dark freckles.

He pauses where he is, wondering what the best plan is here: to introduce himself, or to ask her what she needs like he doesn’t know who she is, or to wait for Luisa and bank on her unthreatening femaleness to defuse the situation, or to turn around and get back into the car and drive it straight into the fucking ocean because he’s so goddamn tired and he doesn’t want to deal with any of this. Not that last one, obviously. But — the others all seem to have their pros and cons.

Quentin doesn’t get a chance to decide, though. While he’s making up his mind, the false door of the false condo opens, and Hannah runs out onto the sidewalk, looking pissed.

“What are you _doing_ here,” she says to the woman, clearly her sister, “I told you I’m _fine_ now —”

“What are _you_ doing here,” her sister returns, voice vibrating with the kind of anger that comes from a mix of love and fear, “Hannah, this is crazy —”

“I’m not _crazy_ ,” Hannah says, jaw set defiantly, “I’m a _magician_.”

Her sister takes a deep inhale through her nose, like she knows she’s made a mistake. “I didn’t say _you_ were crazy,” she says slowly, with a kind of nauseated concern in her eyes that suggests she hasn’t ruled out the possibility. “But, Hannah-bee, please. You don’t know who these people are. You don’t know anything about them.” 

“They’re _nice_ ,” Hannah protests. Spotting Quentin, she gestures towards him. “See, you can talk to him. He’s like, totally normal.”

“Hey,” Quentin says with a little wave, trying to project this promised normalcy. “Quentin, it’s — nice to meet you.”

The sister rounds on him. “Hi, who the _fuck_ are you? What the hell are you doing with my sister?”

“So — first of all, we were going to call you, but, uh — things came up,” Quentin says, because _we had to go burglarize your sister’s algebra textbook from your parents’ apartment_ seems like it might not make a great first impression. “But we’re not — we really just want to help.”

“Who the fuck is we?” the sister demands. “Did you tell my sister she’s some kind of magician?”

“I — yes, I did,” Quentin says, stomach tightening, “and I know how that — sounds —”

“How it _sounds_ ,” she says, “is like this is some kind of insane pedophile cult that abducts children.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Hannah says, rolling her eyes the way only a pissed off sixteen-year-old can, “he’s not, like, _raping_ me.”

Quentin full-body cringes. Somehow it’s so much worse now that she’s said it out loud. “No one’s doing anything — untoward, which — I know that’s not very convincing — if we could just talk for a few minutes —”

“I have nothing to say to you,” the sister says, dismissing him with a shake of her head. To Hannah she says, “Okay, enough. Hannah, let’s go.”

“Go where?” Hannah says, sullen.

“Home.”

Hannah’s eyes flare up. “I’m not going fucking home.”

Her sister makes a _come on_ gesture with her arms. “I’ve been driving all day, and I have to get back by tonight, and I just — Hannah, please.”

“ _No_ ,” Hannah says, arms folded protectively across her chest. “I’m not ever going fucking back there again, and you can’t make me.”

Her sister purses her lips. “I know things have been — extra tough lately. I know what Mom and Dad are like —”

“You don’t,” Hannah says, voice thick, “you never _have_ , they always liked you _better_ than me —”

“I know, I know they’re harder on you —”

“They think I’m _crazy_ , they always _have_ —”

“I know, and that’s why — I promised you, remember?” She steps forward gently; Hannah takes a stubborn step back. “I promised I was going to get you out, and you know I’ve been busting my ass to make sure I can keep that promise, right? Because I’d do anything for you. We’ve got each other, right? No matter what. But I can’t let you stay here.”

Hannah is shaking her head furiously, eyes filling with tears. “No. I’m not going.”

“It’s just a few months,” her sister pleads, “just until the summer, and then —”

“ _I’m not going_.”

Something is happening in the ambient, Quentin realizes. He sharpens his attention to try and parse it — something is gathering threads together, knotting up tense and volatile and _strong_ , right where Hannah’s standing. He’s not sure, but he thinks the house’s wards are starting to waver with it. There’s a young, untrained magician building up a huge amount of pain inside her; Quentin knows how poorly that can end. He needs to get this situation under some kind of control or the outcome will be worse than bad blood between siblings, but he has no idea how the fuck to do that. He could cast a quick spell as a distraction that doubles as proof, but the sister’s so intent he’s not sure what kind of power he’d have to pull to convince her, and what he might do that wouldn’t leave her even more sure Hannah’s in dangerous hands. Desperately he looks up the street where he knows Luisa won’t be walking for a while yet, then to the false door of the house’s ward, silently begging someone to walk out of it — Ray or Toni or Cynthia even, someone older and calmer and wiser and sure — someone who can be a fucking _grown-up_ —

But there’s just him.

So he takes a deep breath and says, “She was sleeping on the street.” It’s the truest thing in all this — truer than magic, even — the linchpin that makes sense of this fucked-up day. Hopefully the truth of it will be enough to matter.

Hannah’s sister turns to him, stunned. “Excuse me?”

“When we found her,” Quentin says, “she was sleeping on the street. I don’t know — what was going on at home, or what your parents are like, but — whatever it was, she decided sleeping in an empty lot was better than that. And I know that doesn’t really make me look any less sketchy, here, but just — look, that’s why any of this is happening, okay? And I just — I thought you should have that information, before you — decided what to do next.”

She stares at him, mouth hanging open, eyes horrified like she doesn’t want to believe.

“We can just talk,” Quentin says. “Give me — ten minutes, and then — I’m not going to force anyone to do anything. But — anyway. Now you know.”

The sister bites her lip. She turns to Hannah and softly asks, “Baby, is this true?”

Hannah shoots Quentin a mutinous look, but she nods.

Her sister presses a hand to her mouth. “That bad?” Hannah doesn’t say anything. “You didn’t tell me — did something happen?”

And then it’s like with this sudden brush of gentleness, the insanity of the past twenty-four hours and whatever fear and pain she’s been carrying for however many months and years before that hits her for real, and Hannah crumbles, chin wobbling for one strained second before she collapses into wordless keening sobs. She stands on the sidewalk, arms around herself, face red and twisted in agony, shoulders heaving as she cries, and Quentin feels his own eyes prickle just watching her — this girl, this kid, trying to hard to be so much braver than she should need to be. Her sister moves to embrace her, but —

“Wait,” Quentin tries, knowing he’s too late even as he says it, “don’t —”

— all that pent-up magic has to go somewhere, and without a trained magician’s skill to disperse it, Hannah lets it fucking _blow_ —

Quentin shields his eyes, trying to peer through the brightness even as he’s bracing himself to stay steady, not enough without his own casting to back him up — the force of the energetic shock sends him sprawling backwards, dizzy even before his ass hits the ground, elbows scraping on the pavement; he hears his own voice calling out, “Hannah? Hannah —”

When the aftershocks of the explosion have cleared, Quentin sits up, wincing at the movement, and tries to survey the scene. There doesn’t seem to have been any serious damage caused; the house’s wards must have absorbed most of the blast. They’re gone now, revealing the mint-green boards for what they are, but the structure itself seems unharmed. Hannah’s sister is on the ground in a similar position, looking bruised and scared but not grievously injured.

Hannah is standing where she was, trembling, shocked out of her tears with an expression of abject terror on her face. “Beth? Beth, are you okay?”

Her sister — Beth — pulls herself to a standing position, a motion that costs her, to gauge from the look on her face. “Hannah — baby, I’m okay —”

“I’m sorry,” Hannah whispers, face crumpling again, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry —”

“It’s okay,” her sister says, wrapping her up tightly in her arms while Hannah buries her face in her shoulder and apologizes and cries, “it’s okay, banana, it’s okay…”

Quentin gets to his feet, keeping his eyes averted from the sisters. It feels like an unbearably intimate scene to witness. He needs to talk to Beth, still, and he wants to talk to Hannah while she’s freaking out about what she did, but — clearly they need a moment.

The door of the house opens and Toni steps out, long skirt flowing around her ankles. “Did you guys feel that? I think our wards came down.” She catches sight of Beth, staring at her agog. “Oh — are you Hannah’s sister? It’s so great to meet you. Will you be staying for dinner?”

Beth stares at her, arms still around her weeping sister’s shoulder. She looks at Quentin, astonished; there’s a thin cut on her cheek, and her wrist is held at an odd angle. “I don’t — I don’t understand, I — so this was…?”

Quentin manages a grim smile. He wishes her introduction to the topic could have been a happier occasion, but you don’t always get what you want. “Like I said — Hannah’s a magician.”

*

Beth lets Toni tend to her and Quentin’s mild injuries, groaning in pain — “Sorry,” Toni says, “I’m really _not_ an expert at healing spells, but that wrist looked like it was in bad shape” — while Hannah looks on in sick horror, not speaking. Toni’s gentle caretaking seems to calm Beth down enough to talk about the magic Hannah’s unintentional casting has made impossible to deny. Quentin does his best to set her at ease and convince her that they have her sister’s best interests at heart, giving her his contact information and offering to complete a Word as Bond that as long as Hannah stays in this house, he will do his utmost to prevent harm from coming to her. Beth doesn’t take him up on it, but once their wounds are settled, she takes Hannah upstairs.

Quentin feels like he should go help Nico and Cynthia rebuild the baseline wards, or text Luisa an update, or draft up a Word as Bond as further proof of his intentions, but he’s so fucking tired it seems impossible to move. He winds up sitting for what feels like a long time at the dining table staring into space, drinking coffee he can barely taste for caffeine he’s not convinced is having any effect anymore, wondering yet again if he’s doing the right thing.

Beth comes downstairs, looking shell-shocked still, and joins him at the table. “Is there any more coffee?”

“Sure thing.” Quentin heaves himself to his feet with what feels like an enormous effort to pour her some. Sitting blessedly back down, he asks, “How’s Hannah doing?”

“Asleep now. Seemed pretty freaked out before that. Not that I fucking blame her.” Beth twists her healed wrist, staring at it as her hand moves. “Is that — what the fuck _happened_ back there?”

Quentin shrugs. “Sometimes when people who can do magic get upset — especially if they’re young, and they haven’t learned how to use it — it kind of uses itself. It can react to your emotions.” A thought belatedly occurs to him, and he surreptitiously digs out the compass to check it under the table while she takes this in — but no; it stays dull and dark. Beth doesn’t have latent magic potential. Disappointed, he slides it back into his pocket.

“So,” Beth says, trying to process, “so is that going to happen every time she gets mad? I mean, I love my sister, but she can have a fucking temper, is that —”

“It’s rare,” Quentin says. “Something like that, with that much power — it would have to be a pretty extreme emotional circumstance, I think, to get her there again So, I doubt it'll happen again, but — I can't promise it won’t.”

"Extreme emotional circumstance, huh?" Beth barks a harsh laugh. “Well, I guess she really can’t go home, then.”

Quentin nods, accepting the untold story in her voice. “A place like this, it has — I mean, you saw outside: its — protection came down, but that’s because it caught most of what she was doing. It’s as safe a place for her to be while she learns to work her magic as there is.”

“Safe.” Beth mouths curls bitterly.

Quentin drums his fingers along the side of his mug. “I’m sorry about — whatever it is that, that happened, to — to Hannah, and —”

“Save it,” Beth says. “Or, I mean — thanks, but, I just —” She shakes herself. Quentin feels bad for bringing it up. “She told me you told her she had to go to school or she couldn’t learn magic.”

Quentin smiles. “Yeah, I did.”

“That’s good,” Beth says decisively. “That’s —” She buries her face in her hands and suddenly she looks young to Quentin, too. She’s a college senior, he remembers; what, twenty-two? Not a kid, exactly, but — isn’t she, kind of? Quentin has the impulse to — he doesn’t know what. Touch her shoulder, or tell her it’s going to be okay, or say that she should stay too, magic or no — but she’s an adult. And she’s a fuckload older than he was at twenty-two.

“I’m trying to find a job,” Beth says, her tone oddly adult out of her youthful face, nothing like the Columbia kids Quentin remembers chatting about law school apps and interviews at McKinsey. “I mean I have a job, I have two jobs, but — I’m trying to find one in the city, so she can stay at the same place next year. She likes her friends there, you know.” It’s such a maternal thing to say that it makes Quentin want to cry. “So — but it’s in our neighborhood, or their neighborhood, or — I mean they know our parents, the school does, and — and I don’t know what they’re going to do about her being gone, I mean they haven’t even called me yet, but eventually — and I don’t know how she’s going to get there, I don’t know if there’s a bus —”

“I can drive her to school,” Quentin says. “And —” He hesitates; it’s not his favorite type of magic, what he’s about to offer. But this is about Hannah, not him, so he says, “And there are — we can do things. To, uh. If you’re worried about — about your parents — doing something, we can — we can keep her safe.”

“With magic,” Beth says.

“With magic,” Quentin says.

Beth stares into her coffee like she’s hoping it will offer her an answer. “And you’ll call me, to tell me — whatever. Anything. I mean I‘m going to be calling her like every day, but — you know. You’ll call me.” Quentin nods. Beth blows out a long breath through her lips, sounding like she can’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. “I guess she’s staying then.”

And Quentin feels — terrified, and relieved, and exhausted, and glad.

*

Beth doesn’t stay for dinner, but she does accept Toni’s offer of leftovers heated up in Tupperware to take with her on the road. Hannah’s still sleeping when she leaves; she doesn’t come downstairs to eat, either. Once he’s robotically shoved a helping of vegan lasagna into his face, Quentin wants nothing more than to fall into bed and pass out for twelve hours, but his feet drag him to the door of Hannah’s room first.

He knocks lightly, not wanting to wake her if she’s asleep. Between the emotional rollercoaster and channeling that much power unplanned, the kid needs her fucking rest. But he’s glad anyway to hear her voice telling him to come in. Hannah’s sitting in bed, knees drawn up protectively the way they were last night — was it really only last night? — at the lot. She’s still wearing Luisa’s sweatshirt; Quentin remembers with a start that he still has all her stuff miniaturized in his messenger bag. “Hey. How are you feeling?”

She shrugs, not meeting his eyes. Quentin looks around for a chair and finding none sits gingerly at the foot of her bed. “It’s been kind of a long day,” he says.

Hannah says, “Can you turn it off?”

Quentin frowns. “Turn what off?”

“My magic.” Her voice sounds very small. “The lady from the Library said, the tattoo, there’s a permanent version of that, that just — keeps you from Traveling, forever. So I thought — maybe you could do that for the rest of it.”

“Oh.” Quentin’s heart is breaking a little for her, but he tries to stay calm. “I don’t know. There might be. I can ask my friend at the Library — if anyone can find the answer, she probably could. If there isn’t something permanent, there’s probably — things we can do. Um, wards or — potions, maybe. Amulets, that kind of thing. That might not — turn it off all the way, but — bring it down a bit, or a lot.” Hannah nods a little. “Is that what you want?”

She shrugs again. Her chin dimples like she might start to cry.

“Is this about — what happened outside?” Quentin asks.

She nods. A single tear escapes and she wipes it away as it falls. “I’m really sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Quentin says. “It’s not — I know it wasn’t your fault.”

“It was,” she says, quiet and insistent. “I — I hurt you. And my sister. I —” She shakes her head, tears running down her cheeks. “If that’s magic, I don’t want it.”

Quentin opens his mouth to say, _That’s not magic_. But he doesn’t, because — it is, isn’t it? Magic is life. It’s pain and fear and destruction and rage; it’s terrifying and ugly and uncontrollable. He knows that, down to his very bones. It’s just — other things, too. But he doesn’t know how to explain that to her. How to get her to understand the fucking impossible calculations of risk and reward that always come down somehow on the side of _yes_ , no matter how fucked up it might seem; how to explain that it hurts, but it’s worth it. Like living, like love. It’s taken him twenty-eight fucking years to begin to accept that; he has no idea how to make it real for a scared sixteen-year-old who can’t go home.

“That is magic,” he admits. “But it’s — it’s like language, kind of. Like — you can use words to, to threaten someone, or hurt someone’s feelings, or commit, like, hate speech or whatever — but you can also, you know, talk to your friends, or make people laugh, or” — remembering the guitar in her room — “write a song.” She’s looking up at him now, but her face is wary. He tracks his brain for a more accessible metaphor. “Or, or it’s kind of like — do you have your driver’s license?”

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “I have my learner’s permit. My dad kept saying he’d let me do my practice hours, but he never did.”

Okay. So that’s another thing to add to the list, maybe. “Magic is kind of like driving,” he says. “Like — car accidents happen, right? I would be lying to you if I told you they didn’t. But that doesn’t mean no one should drive, right? And I’d guess it doesn’t mean _you_ don’t want to drive. Because if you learn to do it — if you do it right, and you try to be safe — then you’ll probably be fine. And you can go — anywhere you want.”

Hannah’s chewing her lip thoughtfully. She still doesn’t look convinced. Quentin doesn’t know how to say, _For better or worse your magic is part of you, so you better find a way not to hate it_. He listens to the internal war happening between his exhaustion and his desire to help her make some kind of peace, and — oh, fuck it. “Look, you’re definitely going to school tomorrow, without a fight, right?”

Hannah nods. “My sister said I had to.”

Quentin sighs. “Okay. So — I have your clothes, and we should get that set up so you can get changed, and you need to eat _something_ for dinner, but after that — would you take a ride with me?”

“Where?” she asks.

He smiles at her. “To do some cool fucking magic.”

*

The lot isn’t nearly so crowded as it was yesterday, but there are still magicians lolling about, chatting and casting and laughing under twinkling spells threaded across the evening sky. Quentin finds them a spot in the back far enough from others that their casting shouldn’t interfere with anything. “So,” he says, “to start with, how do you feel — being here?”

“It’s nice,” Hannah says. She’s looking a little less wan since getting some lasagna in her, and especially since they started approaching the lot. “It feels like —” She hesitates, and Quentin tries to smile encouragingly. “It feels like my dream. The one I had, before — you know.”

“Yeah,” Quentin said softly. “It feels — safe, right?” Hannah nods.

“That’s magic,” he says. “That — that part of you that found somewhere good, and got you out of where you were, because you wanted to — to be okay — that’s as much your magic as anything else. That’s what you can — tap into, or hold onto, your kind of anchor as you learn to cast.”

She looks at him doubtfully. “So how do you do that?”

Quentin goes through his options. He probably should start her on the Popper series, and he will — they’re used in all the schools for a reason, which is that they’re safe and they work — but he wants something a little more special for her, right now, after the day she’s had. “You can feel — the thing that’s different here, right? That gets stronger the closer you get — you don’t need to, to see it or hear it or anything — it’s just there.”

“Is that magic?” Hannah says.

“That’s part of magic,” Quentin says. “But more importantly — the part of you that can feel it, that’s the part of you you need. So — try to focus there, okay, and watch me as — I’m going to start a spell, and you’re going to tell me when you can feel — something change.”

Hannah nods, brows set determinedly; Quentin bites back a smile. He reaches into the ambient to pull out a spell so familiar he can almost smell it before he starts to work the magic: the scent of jacaranda filling the air. The spell channels enough that it should be easy to share, but it has a base hand position to give her something to steady herself with, too. Quentin holds it, right at the point he’d normally cast, studying Hannah’s face for a reaction; he tries to increase the power without casting, but he’s too sloppy — “Shit, I fucked that up — “

Hannah giggles a little. “It smells like flowers.”

“Yeah, that’s the plan,” he says. “But I wanted you to feel the magic first — let me try that again. And, uh — sorry for cursing.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not _twelve_.”

“Fair enough,” Quentin says, amused. He sets his hands in position and tries again, building it slower this time, marshalling all his focus towards the interplay between his magic and the ambient, adjusting controls he doesn’t have names for as he feels the spell reaching for completion and tries to keep it from bubbling over.

It takes a hell of an effort and a long time, but eventually Hannah’s face lights up. “Oh! I feel something!”

“Good,” Quentin said, straining to keep the magic balanced right at the tipping point. He hopes this works, because he’s pretty sure after it he’s down for the count. “So now — now you need to, to touch it, or — or focus, or reach —” He tries to think while keeping the magic steady, of what he can give her that won’t feel like Henry Fogg berating him until Quentin’s power activated itself in self-defense back in his office. Something that will welcome her to magic, instead of scaring her into it. “Think of the way it felt to get here. The part of you that — that came awake for that. Here, you know what, close your eyes and don’t even worry about the spell, okay? Just try to — turn that part on. The part of you that wanted more, and found a way to get it.”

Hannah closes her eyes, and Quentin tries to read her flow. It’s a little noisy with the volume of the lot’s magic, but it gets easier as she — grows it, lights it up — wild and untamed and flickering unevenly, but it’s there, unmistakably. Palpable enough for him to push the spell towards her, try to open it enough to let her in, and —

Eyes flying open, she says, “Oh —”

“That’s it,” he says, “just don’t let go —” And he casts, releasing the blooming scent into the air. “Did you feel that?”

Her dazed smile is all the answer he needs. “Oh my god,” she says. “That was so — it was like —” She laughs, happily speechless.

A warm thrill spreads through him, watching her. “So — listen, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, and we can go as slow as you want, but — do you still want to turn your magic off?”

She shakes her head, grinning, and Quentin smiles back back to match.

*

“This phone call is already the second best thing that’s happened to me in my entire life,” Quentin says when he picks up the phone to hear Eliot’s voice.

Eliot laughs quietly. Quentin is so grateful for that sound. “I’m a little afraid to ask what’s first.”

“Dropping Hannah off at school this morning,” Quentin says, because that’s a sentence that makes sense in his life now. He’d dragged his ass out of bed at seven-fifteen in the morning to make sure she had, like, breakfast before they drove up to the sprawling stucco building, going once more over their cover story where he was some second cousin she was crashing with while her parents dealt with some health issues. Between Cynthia’s forged boarding school acceptance for her family, the kind of shady memory work he managed to talk Toni into working with him, and the honestly terrifying privacy spells Nico and Ray knew between them, her current place of residence or adult guardian shouldn’t really come up, but he had a sense it made both of them feel better to know what to say, just in case. Quentin had told her to have a good day at school and to call him if she needed anything and she had given him a peculiarly polite little wave right before she closed the door and he had watched her walk into the building feeling fearful and protective and also idiotic because, like, she’s not going to fucking kindergarten. Then he had driven home and gotten back into bed to sleep until noon.

“So things are set with her?” Eliot asks. “She’s staying with you? Did you manage to talk to her sister?”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Quentin says. He fidgets with the edge of his shirt. It’s sweet of Eliot to call and to care and to ask and to want to know. It makes Quentin feel warm and loved. And he wants to fill Eliot in on the latest details of the insanity that is his life; he wants them to share their whole worlds. But right now — “Things are — as stable as they’re going to get, I think, for a while, and, um — can we maybe just hit the pause button on that topic, for today?”

“Of course.” Eliot sounds slightly abashed. “Sorry, I was —”

“No — don’t be sorry, it’s — you know, you love me or whatever, I’d be doing the same thing,” says Quentin. “Just — it’s been an exhausting two days, and it feels really fucking good just to — talk to you, so — if we could maybe just talk about something else, while I still have two hours left before I have to pick this kid up from school — I could really use that.”

“Well,” Eliot drawls, “since I very much do _love you, or whatever_ — yeah, anything, Q. What do you want to talk about?”

Quentin shifts to lie on his back, eyes on the white ceiling, as he considers the question. If he could hear Eliot say anything right now, what would it be? What does he want? “Where are you calling from? Are you alone?”

“Just my room at the penthouse,” Eliot says. “I think some others are home, but it’s just me in here.”

Quentin says, “What are you wearing?”

“Nothing particularly inspired,” Eliot says. Quentin can imagine him glancing down at himself for any noteworthy details. “Kind of a Fillorian business casual vibe — navy blue pants, shirt with a butterfly print? I was worried it might be a little loud, but the craftsmanship is top-notch, and I think with the navy it works. _Fantastic_ belt, gold filigree in sort of a saxon pattern with this like Gothic flair — the wardrobe team has been experimenting lately, and frankly I’m loving it. Since when do you care about my clothes?”

“I really don’t,” Quentin says.

There’s a long beat. “Quentin _Coldwater_ ,” Eliot says, astonished and faux-scandalized — or maybe a little real-scandalized, who knows? “Are you trying to have _phone sex_ with me?”

“Uh, yeah?” Quentin says. “Did you have a better idea?” Maybe Eliot doesn’t want to. The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “We don’t have to, obviously.”

“No, I — I want to,” Eliot says, “trust me, I very much want to. I’m just a little caught off guard. I don’t exactly have anything planned, and the unexpected circumstances are a little — _distracting_ , for a brainstorm.”

“That’s fine,” Quentin says. He casts his mind into the Guillerrmo del Toro movie that is his erotic imagination. “You wanna hear something I used to jerk off about like all the fucking time back in Fillory?”

Eliot gives a somewhat hysterical laugh. “Sure, why not?”

“So I’m at Columbia, right?” Quentin says. “A college student.”

“I feel I should have divined this somehow,” Eliot murmurs.

“And you’re my professor,” Quentin goes on.

“What kind of professor?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. Eliot and his fucking scene-setting. “A hot one. Uh, I don’t know, lit, probably? That was my major. You can change it if you want to be a professor of — whatever. What’s your forged B. A. in?”

“Lord, I don’t even remember,” Eliot says. “Knowing me it was probably fashion merchandising like Elle Woods in _Legally Blonde_.”

“I don’t think they have a department for that at Columbia,” Quentin says. “But whatever, that’s not important. So, it’s almost Thanksgiving break, and I’ve been in your class for like two months. And that whole time I’ve been just like — obsessed with you. Not in like a stalker way, just — you’re so fucking hot I can’t deal with it. I sit in class and I can’t stop watching your fucking hands, thinking about what they’d feel like inside me. Looking at — the fucking _enormous_ bulge in your pants, like, it’s honestly obscene that they let you leave the house like that, and you spend an hour lecturing about twentieth-century American crime narratives like you don’t even know.” Quentin feels a pulse in his groin, picturing it: Eliot standing casually professional, inscrutably aloof in his elegant outfits. Totally removed from Quentin’s roiling self, hunched over in hot-faced horny agony, a million blissful miles from his current actual life. “And it’s like, you must know, right? You have to know what you look like. And I must be so, so fucking _obvious_ , sitting there staring at your dick for an hour, wondering how the fuck you expect me to learn shit about Chandler’s innovations in the hard-boiled tradition when I’m sitting there at my ancient-ass desk wondering what it tastes like, and how huge it must be when it’s hard. How the fuck you expect _any_ of us to pay attention to fucking — _modernism_ — when it’s like, Jesus, look at you. Sometimes I wonder if you’re just fucking with us. Am I setting enough of a scene?”

Quentin can hear Eliot take a long breath in. “Yeah, I think I’m getting the picture.”

“Good.” Quentin moves to rest his hand on his crotch, softly for now, just to appreciate the building heat. “But then other times I wonder, you know, what if it’s just me? I mean, obviously other people think you’re hot. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an Ivy League campus, Eliot. You’re like in the top point-oh-one percent of hottest people any of us have _ever_ seen. But maybe I’m the only one who can’t stop staring. The only one so fucking — obsessed, so fucking desperate, that after class I go back to my dorm and I can’t stop thinking about letting you fuck me — letting you do anything to me.” He starts massaging his palm along his dick, feeling himself starting to stiffen up as he conjures up the impression of his younger self’s painful, unwanted longing. “Maybe I’m the only one perverse enough to look at you and think, I’d let you use my body for any sick fucking thing you wanted.”

“Jesus, Q,” Eliot gasps. “This is some fucking fantasy.”

“There’s plenty more where that came from,” Quentin says. “If this is, you know. Doing it for you.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” Eliot says. Quentin can tell he’s fighting to keep it light. He presses his hand against his jeans harder, feeling his own erection curving beneath the denim.

“In that case,” Quentin says, feeling a smirk curling his own lips to think of Eliot in New York, writhing against his hand over how bad Quentin wants him and how goddamn much Quentin has to say on that topic, “so it’s like, the week before Thanksgiving break, right? And I show up to your office hours, when no one else is there.”

“Just to check,” Eliot says, “you’re like, a senior or something in this scenario, right? Like, I’m sketchy, but I’m not a _total_ creep?”

“Sure,” Quentin says, although historically in this fantasy he is very much… not a senior. Probably he shouldn’t spring the jailbait conversation on his boyfriend without some warning. Or, like, maybe not at all. Some things can be just for him. “You can be a TA if that makes you feel more comfortable, or whatever.”

“No,” Eliot says, “I like the idea of an office all to myself. And —” He starts slipping into a new register, dark and imperious and smug; just the sound of it makes Quentin shiver. “I _really_ like the sight of my most infuriatingly hot student walking in with that look in his eyes.” In his normal voice he adds, “At least, I assume I do.”

“You could,” Quentin says agreeably. “Uh — in my head you kind of don’t, actually.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” Quentin says. He almost doesn’t go on because it’s so embarrassing, but then he decides to go on because it’s, fuck, _so embarrassing_. “Usually it’s more like — you’re totally horrified that you’re about to betray this like total lack of self-control or whatever, like really just — miserable and furious about it, actually, and you’re also pretty mad at me for making you do it.” Just sketching out the broad outlines is turning him on.

“I see,” Eliot says.

“I might have a very shame-based sexual psyche,” Quentin remarks.

Eliot trills a bubbling laugh. “ _Might_?”

“We don’t have to do it like that,” Quentin assures him. “Your way is good too.”

“Well, I’m certainly not _opposed_ ,” Eliot says. “And I did promise to distract you from your troubles, so.” Back into the other voice, harder and meaner this time, oh _fuck_. “So my hottest fucking student shows up, like having to deal with you in a fucking lecture hall three times a week isn’t bad enough. Now I have to hope my desk hides my fucking hard-on while you babble at me about your stupid research paper and I try not to think about your dick-sucking lips.”

Quentin squirms happily; how did Eliot know he wanted him to be callously indifferent to Quentin’s coursework? Eliot’s just the best, Quentin thinks, almost dreamy for a moment. Then he focuses on the situation at hand: the wood-paneled office, the desk strewn with journals and books open to relevant pages, the laptop shut off to the side. One of those little green desk lamps. Sitting in the chair with bad posture and bony ankles and oily skin and ill-fitting jeans and a sweater with too-short sleeves, hair falling into his eyes. And on the other side: Eliot, poised and perfect, friendly with just a hint of something else in his eyes that — no; it must be in Quentin’s head, right? “But I’m not here to talk about my homework.”

“Oh?” Eliot says, fully in character now. “What’s on your mind — Quentin, was it?”

Quentin flushes as he thinks: _he knows my name_. “You have to know. There’s no way you don’t.”

Eliot laughs awkwardly. “I’m afraid I have no idea.” Quentin bites his lips, stewing in anticipated humiliation. “Why don’t you enlighten me?”

“Come on,” Quentin says, voice nearly cracking, “I — I’ve been coming to your class for three months just to sit there like a fucking mess, and I — I can’t take it anymore.”

“Can’t take what anymore?”

“Don’t play fucking stupid,” Quentin spits, startling himself. On the other end he hears Eliot breathe _oh, fuck_. “I can’t take how much I want you to fuck me.”

Firm, volume rising: “Quentin, I’m sure —”

“Look, I know it’s fucking idiotic.” Quentin says. “I know that you are — _way_ the fuck out of my league. I’m, I’m a depressed super-nerd with absolutely no prospects, I’m failing all my classes because I’m too fucked up to do the goddamn reading, and you’re this like, gorgeous genius. You’d never look my fucking way twice. Not to mention, like, I could — I could get in huge trouble for this, I could get _you_ in huge trouble.”

“My career would be over,” Eliot says.

“And even if in like, a vacuum, you might maybe condescend to pity-fuck me if you found me drinking my sorrows away in some bar, I know you’d never in a million years risk your professional future, over _me_ of all people. And you — you seem like a nice guy, so — you probably wouldn’t want to even if you knew we wouldn’t get caught, because it’s like — I mean, it’s wrong. It would be so fucking wrong.” His chest is flaring up with heat. Slowly he starts rocking his hips against his hand. “I know we —”

“We can’t,” Eliot finishes, hoarse.

Quentin swallows. “We can’t. But I’m — I’m desperate —” He holds the next word in his mouth, burning his throat like tequila. “I’m so fucking desperate — Professor.” Eliot inhales sharply. Quentin can see him in the office, eyes flaring against his will, and in his bed in New York, curved throat tilting back. He’s so hard it fucking hurts, but it seems like cheating to unzip his jeans just yet. “I can’t — I can’t stop thinking about you, I can’t stop thinking about — how much I want, I want you, I — I wouldn’t tell, I swear, I wouldn’t tell anyone, I’d, I’d keep the secret — and I’d do anything,” Quentin says, back arching. “Any goddamn thing for you, anything you want, I — Professor, _please_.”

“You have to leave,” Eliot says, low. “You have to get the fuck out of my office and go. This cannot happen.”

There’s a plea in his voice, though, like the real reason Quentin has to leave is that Eliot can’t hold back much longer. “Tell me you don’t want me, then.”

A beat. “Excuse me?”

“Tell me to my face,” Quentin says, “that you don’t want me — that you don’t want to me gagging on your monster fucking cock, that you don’t want to bend me over your desk and fuck some pathetic little undergrad so hard he can barely talk — say you don’t want me, and I’ll go.”

A long silence. Quentin’s hand is on his zipper, tensed, not technically waiting for permission but feeling like he is. Picturing Eliot staring at him across the desk, eyes dark with horror and something else, undeniable now.

Finally Eliot says, brokenly, “I can’t.”

Quentin stops breathing for a second.

“Come here,” Eliot says, and he doesn’t say it like a command, but he doesn’t have to; he has all the power here.

“Okay,” Quentin says, imagining: his — sorry, El, and also like, God — skinny freshman body, gawky and raw and nearly untouched, walking on shaking legs to stand before Eliot looking him up and down.

“Number one,” Eliot says, steely now, “if you’re going to fucking bring me to this, the least you could do is show me some goddamn respect. Try that one again.”

Quentin shudders. “Yes, Professor.”

“Better,” Eliot says, although he still sounds deliciously dissatisfied. “Number two — get on your fucking knees.”

“Yes, Professor,” Quentin gasps gratefully, opening up his jeans and shoving his hand down to fist his own dick.

“Is this what you wanted,” Eliot says, “you wanted me to — to cram my cock in your pretty little mouth?”

Quentin moans a little: Eliot’s cock filling his mouth, thick and hot against his tongue, edging into the back of his throat, too much to get around. “Yes, Professor — that’s what I wanted.”

“Jesus, you’re fucking sloppy,” Eliot said, voice dripping disdain that doesn’t quite cover up his hunger. “Have you ever even done this before?”

Quentin almost laughs, because — there’s only ever one right answer when Eliot asks that question. “Never,” he says. “I’ve never —”

“Never _what?_ ”

“Never, never sucked a, a dick before,” Quentin says, losing himself in the blush of some outgrown bashfulness made new. “I’ve never — I’ve never done any of it. Any — sex things, with — with a guy. And — and not much, with anyone. Not since —” _Not since high school_ , he thinks; says, “Not for so long. It’s been so fucking long.”

Eliot laughs meanly. “No wonder you’re so fucking desperate. You mean to tell me that you can’t get anyone to touch your dick, and you decided to make this _my_ problem?”

“I — I’m sorry,” Quentin chokes out.

“I’m not sure I believe you,” Eliot says, pensive, rough. Supercilious in his desk chair, staring down at Quentin on his knees with his wet mouth hanging open. Quentin fists himself, grip tight and magic-slick, feeling wild; this part was never in the fantasy before. “Someone like you? Can’t dress yourself to save your life, sure, but — with that _mouth_ on you? I’ve spent three months trying not to think about fucking you into oblivion and you expect me to believe there’s _no one_ else who’d let you give them messy head?”

“No,” Quentin says, “No, I swear —”

“I think you’re lying,” Eliot says. Where the fuck is he going with this? Quentin feels like he’s about to explode. “And liars —” An excruciating beat. “Liars get punished.”

“Fuck,” Quentin breathes, stomach fluttering. “What — what are you going to do to me?”

“Good question,” Eliot says. He’s committing to the fucking role, but his own arousal rings through every fucking sentence. “I’m tempted to get you ass-up so I can smack you till you can’t sit down.” Quentin groans, imagining himself receiving Eliot’s firm hand while his knees dig into the carpeted office floor. “But you’re so fucked in the head, I bet you’d fucking like that.”

“Yeah,” Quentin pants, “yes — I would, Professor.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” Eliot says. “You ever tell any of those co-eds you fucked around with about this?”

“I —” Quentin pauses, wondering what Eliot wants the answer to be. Wondering what Quentin wants the answer to be. “I did. Yes. Once.”

“Mm,” Eliot says. “What’d she say?”

“She —” Quentin finds himself whispering, shame flooding hot through his skin. “She called me a freak.”

“And did that change your mind?”

Quentin shakes his head, then remembers Eliot isn’t actually here. “No. No, it — it made me want it more.”

“Of course it did,” Eliot says, a baffling combination of snide and approving that travels down Quentin’s spine. “So what am I to do with you now?”

Quentin hears himself saying, like a person possessed, “My face.” His _WHAT?_

Eliot pauses. In a tone much closer to his own, though not quite there, he says, “Your — face?”

“You should, you should hit me across the face,” Quentin says, barely cognizant of the words tumbling out of his mouth, overwhelmed suddenly with the image of this thing he has never in this or any other life wanted and now finds himself fucking wildly into his fist just to mention. “Or, or — slap my face, my — like you said, my pretty face, you should — that’s what my punishment should be.”

Slowly, with a shade of disbelief, Eliot says, “You want me to punish you by slapping you across the face? That’s what you want?”

“Yeah,” Quentin pants, “I — want that, El — uh, Professor, I — please —”

“Okay, well — then that’s what you’ll fucking get,” Eliot says, and he’s El and the Professor now, silky and harsh, promising and threatening, Quentin is going to combust thinking of his adoring eyes telling Quentin he can have anything he wants and his indifferent hand brought up high in the dimly lit office above the shivering freshman who can barely suck cock — punctuating it just right so Quentin knows exactly how to fit the motion in he says, “Sit there and take it, you filthy fucking _slut_ —”

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Quentin cries out, jerking furiously in hard fast strokes.

“I’ll make it fucking _hurt_ , you freak —”

“ _Fuck_ — fuck, _Eliot_ —”

Quentin comes with an explosive noise and a final rough stroke in an orgasm so hard he is legit seeing goddamn stars. He blinks a few times, trying to reconnect his brain to his mouth. His entire body feels brand new. “Jesus, El. That was so good.”

“Yeah?” Eliot says, breath choking as he works himself, obviously getting close. Quentin _loves_ him.

“Yeah,” he sighs, closing his eyes, “that was — so much fucking better than it was in my head, god, you just made a fucking _mess_ of me. You just — you just know everything I want, El. You know what I need and you know how to give it to me — better than I do, even. You take such good care of me — you showed me how to feel good, El. First and always. Loving you and touching you and everything we do together, it feels so fucking good.”

Wildly Eliot says “I fucking — love you, Q — _ah_ —”

Quentin smiles, hearing him finish himself off on the other end of the line. “I love you too, El. So much.” He cleans himself up, listening contentedly to the sound of Eliot’s heavy breathing.

After a moment Eliot says, “Jesus _Christ_ , Quentin.”

“Mm,” Quentin agrees happily. He feels like a cat in a sunbeam. Like getting off with Eliot just wrung out all the stress and fear and worry of the past two days, and he’s remembered down in his bones that whatever comes next, he really will be okay. His life is fucking crazy, but it’s still good, too.

“Do you really want me to slap you across the face during sex?” Eliot asks.

“That’s a good question. It’s never really occurred to me before.” Quentin tries to picture it, seeing if the image has any effect on his hormones now that the context has shifted. “I don’t… think so? I mean, it’s kind of hard to tell because thinking about it now is sort of like going grocery shopping right after eating a ton of really good Indian food, or whatever, but — I dunno, I feel like in real life it would just kind of hurt. Like, not in a hot way. You know?”

“Uh huh,” Eliot says.

“But, you know,” Quentin says, “I’ll keep you updated, if that changes.”

“I appreciate that,” Eliot says, and Quentin grins because he’s being arch and wry, but Quentin knows he means it, too.

*

The guitar is a little larger than his usual scope, but once he’s spent some time with it and run a few preliminary castings it’s not difficult to form a gameplan to stitch together spells that’ll get it back in working order. Quentin kind of wants to surprise Hannah with it, so he waits till she’s back at school before setting himself up to cast. He’s got the pieces on his desk and his hands in position when another idea strikes him and he deliberates for a moment, looking at the lunar phase calendar he’s bookmarked, before saying _fuck it_ and taking out the notebook he’s been using for spellcraft. It’s going to take him hours to rewrite it to do what he needs, not to mention the fail-safes he’ll need to put in just in case, and he was hoping to start getting back to the knife after fixing it since the next Fillorian harvesting cycle is coming up at the end of the month and he doesn’t feel any closer to a solution, but — that can wait another day.

That night, after Hannah’s finished some chapter review questions for chemistry and a reading response for the first two chapters of _The Great Gatsby_ , she pushes her books to the side and looks expectantly at Quentin. “Can I do more magic practice now?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “I actually had an idea for — here, why don’t you come with me?”

Hannah follows him up the stairs while he explains, “So when Luisa and I were at — when we were getting your stuff, I found — something you didn’t mention, but — well, you’ll see.” Quentin opens the door to his room and ushers her in to where she can see the jagged wooden pieces arranged on his desk.

Hannah’s face does something complicated. “My guitar,” she says, obviously trying to sound nonchalant even though her voice is thick. 

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “And it’s — you know, obviously it’s broken, but, uh — I can fix that.” Her eyes widen sharply with a kind of devastating hope. “Actually pretty much any competent magician could fix it if they put their minds to it, the magic involved isn’t, like, super hard, but — fixing things is kind of my specialty. So I was going to fix it, and give it to you, like — good as new! And I can still do that, if that’s what you want. But I was thinking — there’s this other way I know how to fix things, that’s — a little trickier, and it takes a lot longer, but it’s kind of cool, because — because when you use it, and it works right, things — change. They get fixed, but they’re kind of — different, and they’re more — yours. Or, well — more mine, so far, since I’m the only one that’s done it, but — it’s whoever’s casting it, I’m pretty sure. And they get more — magical, sometimes, although — I don’t know, maybe for a guitar that would mess with your practicing, or whatever, but — you could have mine, if you wanted, for that.”

“You play guitar?” Hannah says.

“Not well,” he says. “I can play, like, Creep, really slowly. That’s a song from like the nineties, kind of an indie rock —”

“I know who fucking Radiohead is,” she says, rolling her eyes. Quentin hides a smile, remembering the Kurt Cobain poster in her room.

“Sorry,” he says, “Anyway, I just thought — I don’t know, the spell’s pretty advanced but I’ve modified it to create a collaborative version where I’d be doing the actual magic but you’d be — connecting, the way we’ve practiced, and I think that’d be enough for you to — leave your mark on it, so to speak. So — if you want. We don’t have to, just — I thought that might be cool.”

Hannah nods, looking at the floor. “Yeah, sure. That sounds cool.” Her tone is studiedly casual, but the corners of her mouth are tugging upwards like rogue balloons. God, is everyone this transparent when they’re sixteen?

They spend a while practicing the tuts she’ll be using, which Quentin had attempted to keep simple but wound up more complicated than he’d wanted. Hannah picks them up quickly, though — much more quickly than Quentin ever did starting out — and he thinks about his lab partner the classical pianist, as new to magic as Quentin had been that first year but tutting gracefully like he was born to do it. At the time Quentin had assumed it meant he was an infinitely more powerful magician; in retrospect it seems so obvious the difference between them was a lifetime of practice spent cultivating dextrousness. It’s been ages since Quentin had to think about a tut sequence as hard as he had to think about every single motion back then.

After he gives her a timing cue that finally turns a dry run into an initiated casting, Quentin asks, “Do you mind if I take some notes, before we go on?”

“I don’t mind.” Curiously she watches him jot in his notebook. “Are you taking notes on me?”

He smiles. “Not exactly. More like — I haven’t actually done this before, you know? I’ve shown people spells, but it was always people who already knew how to use magic. I haven’t ever taught someone who was — starting fresh. So — I’m learning a lot here, too. And I thought it might be good to start keeping track of what helps and what doesn’t, because — my friends and I, we’re trying to open magic up, kind of. Spread knowledge to the people who need it.”

“Like Horace Mann?” she asks.

Quentin blinks. “What?”

“Horace Mann,” she says. “He’s from Massachusetts. He like kind of invented public schools. We learned about him in my American history class. Our teacher was really into him. She had a poster on her wall.”

“Oh,” Quentin says. “Uh, yeah — I guess, kind of like that. Anyway so — so far that’s been mostly helping people who are already magicians find ways to, to meet and share ideas and help each other out. But we’re hoping one day to figure out a way to find people who don’t know they’re magicians yet, and — if we manage that, I thought it might be useful to have some of this stuff written down.”

Hannah nods, thoughtful. “That’s cool.”

At sunset Quentin takes Hannah out to the empty plot, carrying a cracked-off chip from the body of the guitar. Sitting on the edge of the bed of soil she watches him dig a hole and prepare it, thumbing over the piece of wood in her palm like a lucky charm until he tells her to drop it in. Quentin runs through the opening sequence once alone to get the magic activated, keep it bright and steady while Hannah bites her lip in concentration trying to reach in. When he feels her magic connect with his, he holds for a minute at the point of their joining, hoping to keep it stabilized; he can see in her eyes the still-fresh shock of channeling it, the determined little nod as she works not to lose it in her excitement. It’s their third day working like this and he can tell she’s already getting better; it’s unbelievably satisfying to think that what he’s been teaching her is actually working.

“Okay, so I’m going to keep tutting,” Quentin tells her, “but — this is the part that you need to do, okay? Just like we talked about. Keep the link alive, but don’t even worry about doing anything with the magic. I’ll take care of all that. You just need to let it in.”

Hannah studies the dirt where the buried piece lies. Doubtfully, she asks, “What if I fuck it up?”

“I’ve got a couple fail-safes built in,” Quentin says, “so — nothing bad will happen. We’ll just — start over. One kind of cool thing about magic is, you know — every spell’s a start.”

Hannah takes this in. She opens her mouth and for a moment Quentin thinks she’s going to need more reassurance. But instead she speaks into the air, loud and clear: “What do you want?”

Quentin feels both the weight of her intention and immediacy of the reply: the broken object’s magic swelling like soundwaves, tracing a picture hazy and fluid and comforting. There’s a familiar spike of anxiety, and he can see it reflected on Hannah’s face. “It’s okay,” he tells her. “You’re doing great. Just — just don’t let go. You’ve got this.”

Her face eases; her magic eases; the magic of the object eases. Quentin sits with — the crackling of potential and the gentle curve of wanting and the angular twist of anxiety and Hannah’s flickering magic and running through every piece of him the magic that’s always been his but means more than it used to, the capacity that’s big enough now to hold all these pieces between his hands and turn them into something else. The power that’s grown with him. He feels it growing now — the spell, the flow, the bright golden thread of wanting to be whole — getting stronger, waking up. Coming alive. _You’ve got this_ , he tells it; he knows, here, that it’s going to work. Then he nods at her to begin to close it out.

*

Julia’s been getting called in through the clock to help with Fillory shit, so they wind up spending several days that playing phone tag before she finally surprises him by tagging along when Penny blips in to work with Hannah that weekend. Quentin is so glad to see her he nearly tackles her to the ground.

Laughing a little at the strength of his hug, she says against his shoulder, “I’m under classified but highly urgent orders to get you the fuck out of the house for at _least_ an hour.”

“Penny’s already banished me from Traveling sessions for getting too anxious about Hannah to provide them with an ‘uncluttered psychic enclosure,’” he says, “so I’m all yours.”

They wind up going to In-N-Out, because Quentin could use some fucking comfort food — “It’s fine, but it’s not, like, better than Shake Shack,” Julia says, and Quentin says “Okay, _right_?” — and over burgers and shakes he fleshes out the broad strokes he’s been sending her through texts, going into cathartic detail about the drama of their discovery and the surreal normalcy of the routine that’s set in the past few days.

“Like, somehow my life now is I wake up, I make fucking breakfast for a _kid_ before dropping her off at _high school_ , I work on my own shit while she’s there, and then in the afternoon I pick her up and give her magic lessons after she finishes her fucking homework,” he says. “And it’s like, fine, and very peaceful, and she’s great, I mean, it feels a little tacky to be like, _at least the runaway teenager we rescued off the street_ _isn’t an asshole_ , but, like — she’s not, so that’s cool, but — it’s like every fucking thing counts more now, because there’s a kid around. Which I know is kind of — nuts, I mean, she’s probably only going to stick around a couple months before her sister takes her home — her sister by the way is like the most insanely mature twenty-two-year-old in the history of the species — but — I don’t know.”

“But you care,” Julia says, giving him a slanted smile.

Quentin looks down at his fries. “Yeah. I really do.”

“That’s not nuts,” she says.

“Maybe,” he allows.

“Penny is totally gaga over her,” she says.

Quentin feels himself smiling. “Really?”

Julia laughs. “Yeah, he thinks she’s just the coolest, cutest thing. Apparently their lessons are going great.”

“He told me that,” Quentin says. “Alice is sending someone to re-up the ink spell this week, but he thinks that might be the last time they need to do it full-strength. I’m not surprised — Hannah’s gaining more control by the day. She’s a really quick study.”

“Or maybe,” Julia says, lifting an eyebrow, “she has really good teachers.”

Quentin rolls his eyes, embarrassed and doubtful and pleased. “It’s a relief, anyway, that she’s probably going to be — safe. As safe as any of us ever are, at least.”

Julia nods. In a softer voice she asks, “What about you?”

Quentin frowns at her. “What about me?”

She shrugs, a familiar wariness creeping into her eyes. “It’s a stressful situation. How are you holding up?”

It’s almost like an out-of-body experience: Quentin watches himself bristling, defenses drawing all the way up at the implication that she thinks, what, he can’t handle his shit? Like he’s so fucking fragile that a few rough days are enough to trigger some, some breakdown? Some fucking _relapse_? He sees how quickly his brain cues up the script for the not-exactly-a-fight they’ve had a dozen times before, every plausibly deniable barb he can use to stonewall her concern until she gives up and leaves him the fuck alone.

And then he thinks: _What the fuck are you doing?_

It is a stressful goddamn situation. Hasn’t he said that to, like, every person he knows at least once in the past week? Haven’t they all asked him some variation on this question? But it’s only Julia that’s drawn his claws out. Only Julia, he realizes, whose care he’s spent more than a decade flinching from, telling himself over and over a story about what it meant.

He doesn’t need to tell that story again.

“Sorry,” he says abruptly. “I — it has been stressful. I’m still a little on edge, I guess. But I’m doing okay. Like I’m — worried about Hannah, about doing right by her, and I feel bad about having to step back from Ley Line shit because I’m spending all day tearing my fucking hair out over the knife, and I’m _definitely_ stressed about, like, accidentally causing a Fillorian war because I can’t deliver on what Margo asked me to, but — somehow, I actually do feel okay, underneath everything.” He braces himself for her to press him on it, not quite able to beat back the preemptive resentment even as he knows he’s given her a shared lifetime of reasons to be skeptical.

But Julia doesn’t push. She nods to herself once, quickly, like she’s reminding herself of something. “That’s good,” she says. “You know I’m here if you need anything.”

Quentin smiles at her. “I know. I think that’s kind of what’s making this all —” _Survivable_ seems kind of strong, even though it’s more literally true for him than for most. “Doable. You know, Luisa’s working with her too, and everyone else is there to help with like, life shit, and Alice and Penny are helping out with the Traveler thing, and between you and Eliot I’ve got, like, moral support, and — none of us are in it alone.” It’s funny how long it’s taken him to believe — really believe — something so clearly true.

*

“So the magic at the site is definitely still calendrically synchronized,” Rishi says. “It’s strongest on Sundays — by every metric I’ve got, not that you really need to measure it. You can feel it, walking out there, and you can see it in how many people it attracts, from how far. But it’s there, the rest of the time, kind of — percolating. Have you been out there lately?”

“A couple times,” Quentin says, “with Hannah.” He gestures towards her, sitting at the opposite end of the table with her headphones in, frowning over an open textbook, pencil in hand. She’s taken to setting up camp with Quentin and Rishi in the afternoons when she does her homework. It’s kind of nice. Like they’re managing to make her feel at home. “It seems to be helping as she figures her way out around how all this feels.”

“Yeah?” Rishi says curiously. “Do you think I could talk to her about that?”

Quentin shrugs. “Probably? You can try. I don’t know how useful it would be. Why are you asking me, though? She’s not, like, _mine_.”

“I know,” Rishi says, “but — you know.”

Quentin raises his eyebrows. “I literally don’t.”

“Because,” Rishi says. “You have, like —” He shrugs helplessly. “Dad vibes.”

“Dad vibes,” Quentin repeats. “Should I be insulted?”

“Not, like, in general,” Rishi says reassuringly. “Just, you know. With this whole — thing. You give off some vibes, like a dad.”

“Uh huh,” Quentin says, skeptical.

“Dad vibes aside,” Rishi says, “I think I’m actually going to wind up incorporating a lot of interview data into this thing. I’ve talked to a ton of people onsite, magicians and not, and their experiences form a really interesting picture — some clear commonalities, but more differences than I would have expected, being there myself.”

“Non-magicians, too?” Quentin says.

“I don’t tell them what it’s for, obviously,” Rishi says. “They think I’m a sociologist doing a project on urban spaces. But they’ve been showing up, too. Not that many, but enough that it’s definitely a pattern.”

“Are you sure?” says Quentin. “They could be like Hannah — adepts who don’t know it yet.”

“Luisa loaned me her compass,” Rishi says. “And I actually did meet a guy who had no idea about his own abilities — got him set up with the newbie-friendly channel on Ley Line, so hopefully that helped him out. He’s the only one it lit up for, though. The others seem normal, but they have — weird shit with the space. Dreams, images, this sense of need or curiosity. A couple have said a friend of theirs mentioned it and they knew instantly they had to come.”

Quentin’s about to ask about whether they’re impacted by the magic’s proximity, but their conversation is interrupted by a frustrated sigh. Quentin looks across the table to see Hannah taking out her headphones, shoulders slumping. “Do either of you know negative exponents?”

“I might need a minute to review,” Quentin says, “but — basically, yeah. Do you need help?”

 _Dad vibes_ , Rishi mouths at him, and Quentin resists the urge to flip him off.

Hannah nods. “My teacher sucks at explaining things. Everyone is like failing this unit but she just says the same thing over and over.”

“Well, let’s take a look,” Quentin says, moving to sit next to her where he can read her textbook over her shoulder. “Why don’t we start with — what do you feel like you _do_ know about exponents? Any exponents, not just the negative ones.”

Hannah sighs again, but she starts telling him what she remembers. He listens, and he tries to organize his own memories of exponent rules, and he writes out formulas and draws diagrams and comes up with example problems and explains and rewords and explains and reminds and explains again, and as he watches her pencil scratching its way through some conversion practice he’s set for her a voice in his head says: This is why he wants kids. Which, like — he doesn’t literally want kids to help them with their algebra homework. But — he likes this, yeah. He likes listening to her, and thinking about how she thinks, and how she’s letting him try to help even though she doesn’t give a shit about math. The sense of being on someone’s team — pushing her gently forward, cheering her on. So, fine — dad vibes, maybe. Maybe just a little.

*

It really is weird how quickly things have started to feel normal. He adjusts to the new rhythm of his days, anchored by his rides in Ray’s car with Hannah, leaning her head against the window, giving him the same monosyllabic answers that form the common tongue of teenagers everywhere when he asks her how school was. He watches her step out of the passenger seat with her backpack slung over one shoulder and it’s fucking terrifying; he watches her magic develop in the safety of the mint-green house by the bay and it feels like a miracle. In between he manages to resume his work, going back and forth with Josh about the risks and potential payoffs of rewriting the spell to work collaboratively in a place as juiced as Fillory with a magical object as volatile as the knife; Josh promises to learn the second caster’s part if that’s what Quentin decides is best, and Quentin feels a rush of gratitude remembering again he’s not alone.

They dig up the guitar, remade in dark polished wood with an elegant floral inlay along the body and a switch on the neck that gives it an electric sound when flipped. Hannah loves it so much she forgets to be cool, her whole face lighting up like a little kid opening a birthday present; Quentin remembers how he found it, smashed up in her closet, and his chest aches. She starts to play, something complicated and classical, moving her fingers with the skill of someone who’s spent a long time working with discipline, clearly not just a kid fucking around in her bedroom with a handful of chords, and Quentin sits in the garden and listens to her play and he has that thought again, ringing clearly, filling his lungs: he wants this, someday. For himself, for Eliot, for the two of them together.

Hannah’s magic continues to develop; her facility with the introductory Popper sequence is coming along nicely, and she’s having fun with whatever random other spells Quentin and Luisa model or bring her in for when they have time. He can feel her magic getting more active, more refined, when he brings her in to co-cast; it’s an interesting exercise for him, too, learning to adjust his own power to let her play a bigger role, calibrating his channeling so that they don’t overwhelm the intended spell without going so low it drops completely. He shows her some card-swap spells — nothing fancy, just Whalen’s and a few helpful accessories — but it’s enough to teach her some games, and as long as he limits himself to what he’s taught her, she puts up a decent fight. Penny arranges a visit to her sister for her first supervised but self-initiated Traveling jaunt, and Hannah comes back looking like she’s been to the fucking moon. Quentin talks to her sister on the phone at night and when Beth says _She seems happy_ he kind of wants to cry.

Hannah spends most of her weekend days hanging out with her friends doing Quentin hopes and prays nothing too dangerous or illegal, but on a Sunday they go back to the lot in their strange family-shaped configuration. Rishi is still in full thesis mode, running through questionnaires on a clipboard; Luisa and Quentin sort of came to connect with the community but mostly just to enjoy the place’s odd sweet magic. Hannah finds a girl about her age there with her parents and while the two of them busy themselves trading spells and social media handles Quentin and Luisa chat with the girl’s parents — Brakebills alums, it turns out, who spent a couple years using their skills in a fucking finance company but moved out west for a change of pace when they decided to have kids. Quentin has this vision, talking to them about their annual summer trip up the coast, of doing this with Eliot, somewhere in their distant future — the two of them meeting parents, meeting people who by then they’ll think of as _other parents_ , people they might arrange fucking playdates with or have discussions with about the ethics of using digital wards to boost the parental controls on your child’s phone, making conversation while the kids amuse themselves nearby — and he feels almost dizzy, imagining it. He’s being crazy, he knows; he’s only twenty-eight. But, well, actually — not that he’s in any rush, and _definitely_ not that he’s ready, but just because none of the twenty-eight-year-olds he knows have kids doesn’t mean it’s an objectively crazy age to have them. It’s actually definitely not; he’s pretty sure his parents were younger than he is now when he was born. That’s fucking surreal to think about. He places the thought to the side; he has other shit to worry about right now, and a whole future to figure out the rest in.

*

Quentin brings Hannah home to an empty house on a Tuesday afternoon. While they’re working in peaceful silence at the dining table, he checks his phone to find a text from Luisa offering a chore-swap if he’ll pick up groceries while she’s held up accompanying a friend on a stressful vet visit. He hesitates for a moment, not wanting to leave Hannah alone, but like — it’s fine, right? Teddy was way younger than sixteen when he and Eliot started leaving him unsupervised, and while Fillory didn’t have, like, stranger danger, it had a bunch of other fucked up shit they trusted they’d raised Teddy to be smart enough to deal with. Or, Eliot trusted that, and Quentin forced himself to pretend he trusted it until he started to calm down, but — whatever. They let her go meet up with her friends when she wants without putting a fucking tracking spell on her phone; he’s not, like, abnegating some kind of responsibility, letting a teenager do her homework by herself while he goes and picks up some produce and a fresh bottle of olive oil.

He comes back an hour later, arms laden with grocery bags, head still rattling with meta-math calculations relating to the object-centered forcefield stuff he’s been looking into, and almost has a fucking heart attack on the spot because sitting next to Hannah, side by side over matching spiral notebooks while their shoulders shake from laughter that seems distinctly unscholarly, is a teenage boy that Quentin has never before seen in his life.

Hannah looks up at him. “Hi, Quentin. This is my boyfriend Edward.”

Jesus fucking Christ. Maybe he _doesn’t_ want kids.

The guy — her boyfriend? — Edward, a tall and gangly Asian kid with angular black-framed glasses and a button-down shirt clearly left over from before his last growth spurt, gives Quentin an awkward little wave with a polite smile. “Hi, Mr. Coldwater. It’s really nice to meet you.”

“Uh, Quentin's fine — nice to meet you too, Edward,” Quentin says, trying to sound neutrally pleasant. “Hannah, can I talk to you for a second?”

Hannah sets her pencil down and follows him into the kitchen, where he casts a quick silencing ward to give them some privacy. “We’ve been downstairs the whole time, I swear,” she says reassuringly.

“What?” Quentin says blankly.

She shuffles her feet, eyes on the ground. “Like, we’re just — doing homework. Not — anything else.”

It finally clicks that she’s — oh, god, like, trying to convince Quentin that she and her boyfriend aren’t _having sex_ , which — honestly had not crossed his mind before, and he would really really really like the concept to, like, uncross his mind, permanently, because that is — _not_ his fucking business, Jesus, although — is it? As her, like, temporary sort of guardian slash part-time magical mentor or whatever? If she is — sexually active, Jesus Christ, does he owe it to her to at least ask Luisa to talk with her about protection spells? Should he broach the topic with her sister, or would Beth like, have him arrested? What the fuck is the age of consent in the state of California? That’s — okay, focus up, Coldwater, not the issue here — “Yeah, that’s not — I didn’t want to talk about that.” Now or ever, with her or anyone. “I just, uh — Hannah, you really can’t just bring people over here without telling us.”

“Sorry,” she says. “His drum teacher lives nearby, so I told him to come over when he was done. I figured you’d be home soon anyway.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “I get that, but like — I mean, he’s gone through the house’s wards now, what did you tell him about that?”

Matter-of-factly, Hannah says, “I told him they were magic.”

Quentin stares at her. “You what?”

“Well, I already told him I was a magician,” Hannah says. “So he didn’t think it was too weird.”

He can practically _feel_ himself aging, on like, the cellular level. “Hannah, why would you tell him that? We talked about this — we have a whole cover story.”

Looking kind of injured, which Quentin feels extraordinarily guilty for finding annoying because _what the fuck was she thinking_ , Hannah says, like it explains everything, “I know, but — he’s my _boyfriend_.” Which, to her, it obviously does.

“Right,” Quentin says, trying to stay calm. “And I know he — he clearly means a lot to you, and that’s — great.” Is it? “But — you can’t just go around telling people about magic being real.”

“He’s not some random guy,” she says, defensive. “We’ve been together almost five months.”

Quentin chooses not to engage with that. “It’s just — part of being a magician is, is this responsibility we have, to keep things — kind of secret.” Guiltily he flashes to telling his dad, but that was — at least a little different. Neither of them was a high school kid, and Edward’s probably not dying of brain cancer.

Hannah frowns. “I thought you said that you guys were like trying to spread magical knowledge or whatever.”

Well, fuck him. “Yeah,” Quentin says, “I — I did say that.” But I didn’t mean it like _that_ , he wants to add, childishly; when he said what he said, he didn’t think about all the different things it could mean to someone who had no idea what he was fucking talking about. He didn’t think he’d need to be that careful.

“So like,” Hannah says, “isn’t this basically the same thing?”

“It’s not —” Quentin takes a breath to steady himself. “I was talking about people who can do magic, people who are — already magicians, kind of.”

“But you said some of them aren’t because they don’t know it,” Hannah says. Quentin winces because — he didn’t, exactly, but he can see how she got there. “So — can Edward be a magician? He said he’d do the lessons with me.”

Quentin’s heart wilts a little at that. “Oh — I don’t…” He takes out the compass with a sinking heart, hoping Edward might beat the odds, but — no such luck; it stays dull and inert. “It doesn’t work like that. It — it’s kind of something you’re born with, and… and he wasn’t, so.”

“Oh,” Hannah says, eyes downcast.

Quentin feels awful — for her, and for her polite drummer boyfriend who now knows magic is real but will never be able to touch it for himself. “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever. It makes sense.” She shrugs. “Do you have to like, memory-wipe him like in Harry Potter?”

The thing is, Quentin could, and probably he should. It’s not great, to have some random tenth grader walking around with the knowledge that magic is real, and his girlfriend has it, and he knows where she lives. Edward seems like a sweet kid, but Quentin’s heard enough from the other members of the house to know even San Diego harbors people who could use him for some fucked up shit if they happened to cross his path. But looking at Hannah’s crestfallen face, the set in her shoulders like she’s trying to act mature about this, thinking about everything she’s lost lately and what her life must feel like from the inside — he can’t fucking do it. He can’t make her keep that to herself.

He sighs. “Do you think Edward can keep a secret?”

Hannah nods at him, cautiously hopeful.

“And you haven’t told anyone else,” he says. “And you promise you won’t?”

She shakes her head. “No one, I swear.”

“Then…" He rolls his eyes. “It’s probably not the smartest move, but — fine. He can — know, and I guess he can come over, but — only when at least one adult is home, okay?”

She nods happily. “You’re the best.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I’ll try to remember that when Nico is biting my head off about house security later.”

“He’s pissy with everyone,” Hannah says. “He has kind of a negative attitude.”

Quentin smiles. She is the most exhausting thing that has ever happened to him, but he likes her a lot. “You really do learn fast.”

*

Quentin answers the door when the bell rings in the middle of the day and his heart almost somersaults out of his body. “El, hi — what are you —?”

“Surprise,” Eliot sing-songs, eyes fixed on Quentin’s with a dark urgency simmering beneath. “I hope this is okay — I know you’re in Fillory next week anyway, but — I don’t know, your life is crazy, and my life is crazy, and I had an hour or two free, and I thought since it was school hours maybe —”

Quentin doesn’t find out what Eliot thought, because Quentin reaches up to kiss him full on the mouth. “You thought right,” he says breathlessly, “whatever it was, you — god it’s so _fucking_ good to see you —”

“Q,” Eliot says, like he likes the taste of the name in his mouth, hands cradling Quentin’s shoulders which feels somehow both cozy and sexy, “I’m so glad —”

“Let’s take this upstairs,” Quentin says, tugging at Eliot’s shirt, “before I get excommunicated for violating the no sexual activity in common spaces rule.”

It feels like they tumble up the stairs and into Quentin’s room, rushing but unwilling to stop touching each other long enough to move more efficiently, too impatient once they have some privacy to make it the extra distance to the bed. Eliot is _here_ : the flesh and blood of him, his scent and the taste of his hot mouth opening wantingly for Quentin’s tongue, his wonderful strong hands holding Quentin possessively tight, reaching under his clothes for any piece of Quentin’s skin he can touch, making Quentin feel wanted and wild. Quentin kisses at him, at his lips and the skin of his chest with its stupidly hot dark hair as Quentin rushes to open up his shirt and at his wrist when Eliot reaches to run a hand through his hair, catching the soft skin there with his teeth and moaning when Eliot hooks his thick thumb on Quentin’s bottom lip for Quentin to suck on.

Eliot stoops down to get a solid grip on Quentin’s ass and — fuck, _yes_ — hoists him up like a goddamn doll, feet in the air, spins him around for a second, and drops him roughly onto the desk, sending an empty glass cracking on the floor with the impact.

“Shit,” Eliot breathes, “I’m sorry —”

“Forget it, I’ll get that later,” Quentin says, spreading his knees so Eliot can slot in between his legs where Quentin’s cock is already half-hard for him.

“I always forget,” Eliot murmurs against Quentin’s mouth, “you’re so much heavier than you fucking look —”

Quentin laughs. What a fucking bizarre thing to say during foreplay. “Should I take offense to that?”

“Not at all,” Eliot says, arch but with a vehemence that surprises Quentin deep in his gut, “if you must know I actually find it absurdly fucking hot —”

Quentin is trying to get back to the matter at hand, but he can’t help laughing again. Eliot is so _weird_ , Quentin is fucking crazy about him. “Why?”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Eliot says helplessly, like he’s given the question some thought and come up empty, which is totally delightful to contemplate, “I just — _do_ , Jesus, Q — you make me feel fucking insane —”

“Uh huh,” Quentin breathes. Part of him wants to — something hot and uncomfortable and delicious curls in his stomach at the thought of it — egg Eliot on, hear more in that desperate voice about what exactly Quentin makes Eliot feel, let Eliot speak all of his accumulated thoughts about Quentin’s body and what it can do and what it’s for. But, well. They’ve been talking a lot lately, and they haven’t touched each other in ages. The rest of Quentin wants them both to shut the fuck up and get back to the good shit, and today that’s the part his dick is voting with. So Quentin yanks Eliot closer by his shirt, rewarded by a rough sound in the back of Eliot’s throat at the shock of the motion, and kisses him deep and hungry, the heat of their open mouths traveling all through his skin like fire on kerosene. Quentin shivers when Eliot catches his bottom lip between his teeth and sucks on it, holds it there at just the precipice of biting too hard with one hand huge and warm at the small of Quentin’s back and the other fisting Quentin’s hair until Quentin lets out a humiliating strangled noise and reaches down to give himself a hasty stroke through his jeans. “El,” he says roughly, “please —”

He doesn’t even fucking know what he’s asking for, too lightheaded from surprise and arousal to think in any detail beyond the electrical storm in his body screaming _WANT_. But that’s okay, because Eliot is here, and he’s full of good ideas. As confidently as if Quentin had said the words out loud, Eliot drops to his knees in a swift and graceful motion; Quentin’s practically got his dick out by the time Eliot hits the floor, scooting over to the edge of the desk so Eliot can take it in his mouth.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Quentin says, loud and grateful as his cock pushes up into Eliot’s eager mouth, leaning back on his hands to keep himself from collapsing with pleasure. His eyes flutter shut as Eliot’s velvet tongue runs firmly up and down the underside, one hand gripping the base massaging gently with his thumb, the pressure and friction and heat of it melting his spine, rendering him breathless, gasping shallowly for air as he pants, “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

Some unidentifiable rustle catches his attention enough to pry his eyes open. For a second Quentin is almost blinded by the sight of Eliot’s head working determinedly, hungrily, lovingly on his cock, the intensity of his focus and his curls gorgeously mussed from the way they’d attacked each other. Then he sees that with his free hand Eliot is unbuckling his belt, unzipping his pants to — Jesus goddamn Christ — shove his hand down to grip his cock and start pumping himself in short fast strokes. Quentin can’t even see the actual action, but between his trove of memories of what it must look like (Eliot’s cock swollen red-purple, leaking at the slit, thick and huge in his own needful grip, those absurdly long fingers moving furiously) and the frantic jerking of his arm, the kind of motion you use when you’re too far gone to care about dragging it out or making it good — he’s fucking mesmerized by it. Mouth falling open, ragged noises falling from his mouth while Eliot moans throaty and deep around his dick like nothing’s ever felt so right in his mouth.

It’s almost too fucking good — the sensation as Eliot continues to suck him off, his insistent rhythm too thoughtless for his usual creativity, Quentin’s thighs straining as the tension builds in him; the sight of Eliot, _that Eliot_ , the Eliot who’s like his true love or whatever and who is also _the hottest person Quentin has ever seen_ , someone who could have anyone he wanted with the crook of his finger on his goddamn knees for Quentin like swallowing Quentin’s load is what he’s been waiting his entire life to do; the echo of his words earlier — _you make me feel fucking insane_ — and the proof of it here, the fact of Eliot jerking off gracelessly, no show in it at all, just need, just what Quentin does to him and what it makes him want, how quickly he unraveled once he had Quentin in his hands and how Quentin can _see_ that he’s loving this now, Quentin coming undone with Eliot’s head between his thighs and his cock in Eliot’s mouth — how much Eliot fucking _likes_ it, enough to come into his own white-knuckled fist all over the floor under Quentin’s desk —

— “Fuck, _Eliot_ ,” Quentin cries out as his hips jerk forward once, twice, his orgasm radiating through his body as he spills into Eliot’s waiting mouth, shivering through the aftershocks as he watches Eliot’s body seize with a final wrench of his arm, a punched-out groan escaping his throat, lips still tight around Quentin’s dick.

Eliot pulls himself off, looks up at Quentin, clear eyes wide and mirthful. “Hey.” There’s a trickle of semen at the corner of his mouth; he wipes it off with the back of his hand. Quentin will be revisiting _that_ image privately later.

“Hi,” he returns, feeling stupid, feeling absurd, a smile rising on his face like a helium balloon.

They finish undressing to crawl into bed naked and warm, skin to skin, laughing at their own ridiculousness all the while. “See,” Quentin says when his head is nestled against Eliot’s shoulder, “I told you you thought right.”

“I do have great ideas,” Eliot says.

From his spot snuggled against Eliot’s side Quentin catches sight of the glass, still broken on the floor, and lifts his hand to repair it. He can do this one handed now, he thinks, watching the pieces glide back together; that’s kinda neat.

Eliot watches him join the last edges, smooth out the lingering seams, and restore it back to its place on the desk. His hand is draped loosely down Quentin’s back, curving across his torso by his waist. “I keep meaning to ask you — when did you get your magic back?”

Quentin smiles at the memory. “When the _Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Restorations_ came out. Seeing my name there, next to these, like, actual experts in the field — I don’t know, it’s like something clicked. Or something disappeared, or — it was back, after that.” He finds Eliot’s other hand with his own, laces their fingers together. “It’s funny — all this time, I thought it was about you, you know? Even after I pulled it together to stop blaming you for everything I’d fucked up in my life. And I honestly don’t know, maybe that was what fucked it up — not you, but — how bad I let things get. Maybe not. Maybe it was fucked up before I ever noticed. It’s not like I was spending a lot of time trying to fix things, before I left New York.” He thinks again: the broken mirror, the rush of certainty as he called into his hands the spell that would be his last. How he’d used his magic to destroy himself — maybe that’s what had done it, all along. “But it wasn’t you, that I needed to fix things with. It was me.”

Eliot strokes along the side of Quentin’s ribcage, soft and easy. “And you have?”

Quentin considers it, cocooned in Eliot’s touch and the starburst of their love. “I guess so. Or — when I was younger, I wanted so fucking badly to be _fixed_. Especially right after I was in the hospital, the first time…. And eventually I — I kind of accepted that that wasn’t going to happen, but I don’t know that I ever really made peace with that. And now it’s like — I don’t know. I don’t feel broken anymore, but I don’t feel fixed, either, exactly. It’s more like —” He laughs a little. “Like it’s just not important. Like it doesn’t even — mean anything, anymore, because — I have too much other shit to do. So who even gives a fuck, how broken I may or may not be, when I have this whole — life to live?”

Eliot squeezes Quentin’s hand. “That’s kind of beautiful.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. He almost starts to argue, but — well, isn’t it? Kind of? “Maybe. It’s weird, though. It feels like there was this question that like, defined my entire life, and overnight — I mean, not actually overnight, but it sort of feels like that — I just don’t care anymore. And now I get to ask, or have to ask, all these other questions I actually want to care about, which is nice, but also sort of terrifying, because it’s shit like — what do I actually want to do with my life, and what are my, like, goals or whatever, and what do I want for — for us, what do I want our family to be, if we’re even going to have a family.”

“If?” Eliot tilts his face towards Quentin inquisitively. “You seemed pretty sure you wanted that, last time it came up.”

Quentin buries his face against Eliot’s shoulder and lets out a groan before resurfacing. “Of course I _want_ to, but — god, I have to tell you, having Hannah around, I mean, she’s a great kid and sometimes I’m like, talking with her about her fucking chemistry lab and I’m like, _wow, yeah, this is it, this is what I want_. But — El, have you like, thought about it? What it’s actually going to be like, raising a kid here? Not literally here, in San Diego, but like — on Earth? In the twenty-first century?”

Eliot furrows his brow quizzically. “Sorry, you’re saying that would be… _harder_ than raising a kid in a hut in the woods?”

“I mean — the no-running-water or modern medicine thing, obviously that sucked,” Quentin acknowledges. “But Fillory also didn’t have, like, standardized tests. Or, shit, like, school bullies. It didn’t have _cars_ , which are way more lethal than most of the shit that lived in the woods. Or fucking — climate change. Or _smartphones_ , like, what if our kid gets radicalized by the YouTube algorithm? What if they get cyberbullied? What if they want to be famous on TikTok? What if our kid _sexts_? Or, or vapes? And that’s not even getting into, like, Jesus, we haven’t even talked about the, the logistics, but if we go with, you know, some biological procedure, like — what if we have a girl? I mean, I don’t know anything about what it’s like to be a fucking teenage girl.”

Drily Eliot says, “If only either of us knew someone who did.”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same,” Quentin says, “as when you can, like, speak to things first-hand, as a parent — or, I mean, is it? Like that’s the whole _thing_ , right, is — I don't _know_ , about that or anything, like, the fact that we kind of did this before, that doesn’t mean I’ll know what the fuck I’m doing when we’re making choices about — screentime and birthday parties and, oh my god, Hannah was telling me when her boyfriend was here that they hadn’t gone upstairs and it’s like, _do_ we let our kids go upstairs with — with whoever they want? Is that, like, respecting their privacy, or is it giving them way too much leeway to do all kinds of crazy shit, and is it sexist that it freaks me out more to think about that with a girl, or is just me having an intimate awareness of the fact that teenage boys are the worst people on the planet, and is the fact that I’m freaked out about my hypothetical daughter hooking up with some hypothetical guy but _not_ some hypothetical girl like weirdly homophobic of me? When the fuck does she start wearing _bras_ , and is one of us supposed to tell her about that? Who’s gonna show her how to use a fucking tampon?”

Eliot presses a kiss against Quentin’s forehead. “This is a lot of stress about our hypothetical daughter who may or may not exist and definitely won’t be a teenager for, like, twenty years.”

“Okay, and that’s another thing,” Quentin says, “like, I’m obviously not dying to make a plan for becoming the parents to a newborn anytime soon, but — we’re literally not getting any younger.”

“My lower back reminds me every day,” Eliot says.

“You should try yoga,” Quentin says. “It’s super annoying, but it helps. And actually I bet you would find it like three thousand percent less annoying than I do.”

“Maybe I will,” Eliot says placidly. “And maybe a year from now we’ll have a beautiful baby girl and you’ll be calling Julia about the best Judy Blume books to buy her when you’re delirious from sleep deprivation, or maybe we’ll adopt a six-year-old orphan when we’re forty, or maybe we’ll decide we don’t want kids after all, or —”

“Wait, what?” Quentin sits up. “No, like, I definitely want them. Or — one, at least, I don’t know about more than that, but — are _you_ having second thoughts?”

“What, after your soliloquy on the joys of childrearing?” Eliot smiles. “I told you. I don’t need that to be part of my life, the way I think you do. Or — the way I thought you did, until like five minutes ago. But — yeah, I want to have a kid with you. No matter how insane you may or may not be about it. I want you to get everything you want, Q.”

Eliot tugs at Quentin’s waist, and Quentin lets himself be led back down. “I do want it. It’s, you know — it’s become a little more real, lately, because of — everything. And that’s — I wasn’t expecting to have to think about it, in so much detail, for a while. So that’s been — another fucking weird thing about this situation. And it is, like — it scares me a lot, El, when I really think about it, all the shit about — the internet and peer pressure and every fucking nightmare happening in this country. Does it really not scare you?”

Eliot gives a loud belly laugh. Quentin feels his body shake with it. “Literally everything about being a fucking father has scared the living shit out of me since day one. You learn to live with it.”

“I guess that’s true,” Quentin says. It’s not like he wasn’t scared, the first time. He had no idea what growing up on Fillory was like. But he knows what growing up on Earth is like, and it turns out that scares him more. Eliot is so fucking brave. “And I want — I want us to have a kid, I want to raise a kid with you.”

“So,” Eliot says, “we’ll figure the rest out.” He brings Quentin’s hands to his lips, kisses his knuckles.

Which — Quentin knew that. He’s freaked out and terrified but he’s not actually worried, that they won’t be able to do it. He trusts them — trusts Eliot, trusts their love. Trusts himself, too, actually. He takes a deep breath, in and out. Then he frowns. “But, are you — like you’re sure, too?”

“As sure as I am about anything,” Eliot says. “Which sounds like a joke but actually —” He rolls onto his side so that they’re face to face and brings a hand to the side of Quentin’s face. “The things I’m sure about, I’m really fucking sure.”

“You said, though,” Quentin says, “you want me to get everything I want, which is — I mean that’s super sweet of you, El, but we’re not talking about letting me pick the playlist on a road trip.”

“I would never let you do that,” Eliot says.

“I don’t want you to, to feel pushed into something this big, just because it’s — what I want,” Quentin says. “I mean if you don’t — like we can really talk about it.”

Eliot wrinkles his brow. “Do I strike you as a person given to letting myself be pushed around by the whims of others?”

“Not in general,” Quentin says, “but — I do kind of think when it comes to the people you love, you’d do basically anything. I mean —” He rolls his eyes. “This is kind of a trivial example, comparatively speaking, but you invited my girlfriend to your birthday party.”

“I wanted to meet her,” Eliot says mildly.

“Yeah, that’s my point,” Quentin says. “Like no offense, but I feel like that speaks to a concerningly low regard for your own — well-being, or whatever, wanting to pal around with the girlfriend of the guy you’re in love with.”

“Oh, what,” Eliot says teasingly, “and you’re the only one who gets to be in love in a narratively unconventional way? You get to give me this whole _speech_ about how being in love with your ex isn’t what it looks like, but the rest of us have to stick to stock parts with no character development? You’re like on this quest to figure out the truth of your heart, and I’m just the guy tragically pining until his best friend gets a clue?”

“Obviously not,” Quentin says, rolling his eyes, “but — are you telling me you weren’t in love with me back in November?”

“No, I very much was,” Eliot says. “But I wasn’t _pining_. It was —” He shrugs. “I knew I’d say yes, if you asked. But — everything I told you about how I have a ton of shit to work on, and all these things I want to figure out, and how that kind of knocked being in love pretty far down on the priority list — that was all true, Q. I wasn’t bullshitting you to cover for my feelings. I wasn’t lonely. And it didn’t hurt, seeing you — happy. I was — a little wistful, maybe, thinking what could have been. But I was happy for you. I was your friend — that wasn’t an act. That part was real, too.”

Quentin kisses him on the mouth, then, short and sweet. Overwhelmed all over again by the hugeness of Eliot’s heart, all the pieces he’s learned to carry. “Sorry I fucked with your to-do list. I know Julia hates when that happens.”

“I have to get back in about an hour, because shit’s going sideways magic-wise again and we have a plot to patch it up,” Eliot says, “but I have some ideas for how you can make it up to me in the meantime.”

He waggles his eyebrows, and it’s somehow both a stupid joke and dead fucking sexy, that Eliot miracle where he makes so many things true, and Quentin laughs and kisses him because it’s not that funny but he’s in love, and because he wants to suck Eliot’s dick, and because his life is fucking crazy but this is definitely still the best year ever.

*

He drives Hannah to school in the morning and teaches her base tut sequences at night. He catches up with Penny when he stays for dinner after Traveling tutorials and asks him to tell Kady he said hi, and he’ll get to her email about Ley Line shit when he’s planted the knife and can think about other things. He sends Josh elaborate spell revisions followed by profuse apologies for the fact that on reflection he can see actually he was being an idiot and in fact _this_ set of modifications is definitely the path they need to follow. He goes running nearly every day now and once he’s past that brutal first mile that still forces him to question whether he actually likes this, he exhales with relief that he has it, now: a temporary escape, safe and easy, that gets him out of his head just long enough that he walks back through the house’s wards refreshed and ready to continue as he was.

Sometimes when he needs a break from his endless and probably at this point counterproductive rewrites he bikes over to the lot in La Jolla for the fresh air and a change of scene and that odd sweet magic pouring out of it, like a mountain spring that bubbles over with joy. Some people have brought plants in huge terracotta pots or low-slung wooden beds, and to his untrained eye and ungreen thumb they seem to be growing quickly, strangely, familiar-looking shapes sprouting too many leaves, or flowers with petals bigger than he’s ever seen them. He runs into Serena once, there to tend and document — apparently some local Naturalists have started a group chat to keep the plants thriving and mark their progress — and they have a mostly not awkward conversation about the lively strength of the ambient the plants are absorbing. “Like a greenhouse reflecting magic instead of sunlight,” she calls it, and Quentin gives her Rishi’s number to pass on to the Naturalists.

He teaches Hannah the tuning spell he learned ages ago, and when she asks if he wants her to teach him how to play, her face is so open and bright that he can’t say no, even though he really doesn’t have the time. She gives him feedback on finger placement technique, coaxing the sounds he gets out of the strings towards something slightly more musical; he hides a smile when she adopts an earnest and charmingly adult cadence clearly learned from her own teacher — “You’re starting to get it! Now if we can just get your hand to relax, you’ll be all set.” They practice driving around the neighborhood when it’s quiet, Quentin in the passenger seat trying not to have a heart attack even though he’s set like half a dozen safety spells on the car, reminding her to check the mirror. She masters Popper Nine, which he always found a huge pain in the ass, and he takes a video to send Eliot, who replies with a smiley face, and Julia, who texts: _see? I told you she had a good teacher_. A month ago his life was stable and steady and good, and now when he goes to bed at night his head is full of meta-math and chord progressions and California traffic law, but as the day’s tension seeps from his body he realizes fresh every night that actually it still is. He’s still moving steady, feet on solid ground; his life is still good.

*

Quentin’s in the kitchen helping Toni slice potatoes for a casserole when Luisa swings by. “So, Edward’s in the living room.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “I told Hannah he could come over as long as they got their homework done. Is that okay?”

Luisa waves this off. “Well, they finished their homework, and — you should come see what they’re doing now.” She bounces her eyebrows excitedly.

Curious, Quentin rinses and towels off his hands and heads over to where the teens are hanging out on the couch playing cards. Kind of a weird date night activity for a couple of high schoolers, he thinks, but then, how the fuck would he know? “This is cute,” he says to Luisa, hanging back out of earshot of the kids.

“Look at what they’re _playing_ ,” she says.

Quentin fixes his eyes on the game. It looks like War — cards set down one at a time, flipped over in pairs, highest card takes the round. Only Hannah keeps tutting behind her back like she’s moving probabilities around, which seems kind of unfair. Except — “Holy shit,” Quentin says, the hair on the back of his neck standing up. “Is he —”

“You see it too, right?” Luisa says. “I’m not hallucinating?”

Edward is casting, too — hand held behind his back, brow furrowed in concentration. Casting decently, based on their equally large piles of cards. When his own card reveals a blank face, he blinks at it, startled, and Hannah says, in the same tone she uses when she’s teaching Quentin guitar, “I bet you messed up the pinky placement — that one’s kind of hard to hold right. Here, it’s like —”

“I don’t understand,” Quentin says, shaking his head. “I — checked, he couldn’t — he’s not —” He takes the compass out of his pocket and aims it at Edward. Still not a spark; it’s picking up no ability. But there he is, making magic.

“I checked mine, too,” Luisa says. “Either he is, and the compasses aren’t as thorough as we hoped they were, or —”

“Something way bigger than that is going on,” Quentin says.

He approaches the couch where the pair has resumed their game. “Hey guys,” he says. They give him polite greetings. “So — Edward, Hannah taught you some spells?”

Edward nods. “Magic is _hard_. It’s cool, though.”

“Uh huh,” Quentin says, watching him cast. Outside the window five birds, all different species, pech on the porch fence in perfect unison. They should probably pause the game before the probability shit gets too much wackier. But he can’t stop staring at this thing that shouldn’t be happening, but clearly is. “If you don’t mind my asking — Hannah, how did you do it? When we talked, I kind of thought…”

“Yeah, I told him you said he wasn’t a magician,” Hannah said, eyes still on the game. Quentin cringes; it sounds so _harsh_ that way. “I just thought — maybe he could learn a _few_ spells. Just a couple. So we went back to the lot, since Rishi never shuts up about how it has this like super-insane concentration of ambient or whatever, and kind of did like you did with me, remember?”

“And that worked?” Quentin asked.

They flip over their cards: king of clubs, seven of diamonds. Hannah does a little fist-pump and sweeps the cards to the side. “Not really. But then Imani showed up, and we were all hanging out, and we did something together and Edward was like, _wait what was that?_ And then I was like, _what was what_? And he was like, _I don’t know, it felt like something weird happened_. And Imani was like, _well we like did a spell, was that it?_ And he was like, _how the fuck should I know, I’m not a magician_. And I was like, _well, let’s do it again and see if it matches_. So we did it again and he was like, _yeah that was definitely the same thing_. So then I was like, _uh, that’s what I was trying to show you earlier, is it clicking now?_ And he was like, _yeah, yeah, do it again_. So then I tried to do it again, but then it didn’t work. But then Imani was like, _well, maybe we need to do it together_ , and I was like, _oh, that’s a good idea_. So then we did it together, and then Edward was like, _yeah, totally, I can totally feel that_. So then we just did that kind of stuff for a while, and then we taught him how to play. And now he’s pretty good. He almost beat me last round.”

“I’m gonna get you this round,” Edward says.

Hannah snorts. “You wish.” Edward grins at her, clearly besotted.

Quentin is trying to filter through the details of Hannah’s story to process what she’s actually telling him, heart hammering as the reality of the situation sets in. “Hannah, I think you might have done something genuinely groundbreaking here.”

“Aw, thanks,” she says sweetly, before playfully flipping Edward off as he gathers up his six and her two with a cackle.

“Like — okay, I’ll leave you guys alone,” he says, somewhat unnecessarily because he’s getting like twenty percent of their attention, max, “but — later you and I should talk some more, about what you actually did — and I’d love to talk to Edward, too, I don’t know if you want to stay for dinner, if you need me to — talk to your parents, or whatever —”

“They’re pretty cool,” he says mildly. “I can text. What are you guys having?”

“Toni’s making a casserole,” Quentin says, “and I think Ray’s doing a salad — oh, and Rishi will _definitely_ want to talk with you guys, if that’s okay — and, shit,” he says, turning to Luisa now, “I have to call New York, I gotta get in touch with Margo — I’m supposed to be over there in two days and I need to see if she can get me an audience with the queen of the Fingerlings, because — oh my _god_ —” He starts laughing before he can get the thought out, because — he can feel it, the pieces coming together, knitting themselves into something new —

“Because what?” Luisa says, spreading her palms out. “Is there something else I should be excited about?”

“We should all be very excited,” Quentin says, grinning still, “because — I’ve got it, Luisa. I know how to fix the knife.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content note:** The vast majority of this chapter involves interactions with a sixteen-year-old who has abusive parents. No abuse happens in the actual chapter, nor is it described with much specificity, but particularly in the first half of the chapter, the gravity of the situation is clear, and the character's own emotional state is obviously influenced by her history in this regard.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See end notes for a set of notes regarding some (super-consensual and enjoyable to all participants!) sex stuff.

Lady Xanthis of the Fingerlings looks displeased, flanked by her guards with spears at the ready, as Quentin walks the long stretch beneath the arched ceiling to approach her. “Your majesty,” he says, head bowed. “Thank you for, uh — granting me your time and your ear.”

“Magician,” she returns coolly. “Your efforts try my patience. I begin to doubt the sincerity of your attempts.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” he says, “but, look — I said I couldn’t promise it, right? That I’d never done anything like this before. So — I gave it my all, and I tried a bunch of different things, and I’ve thrown all my magic at it, and — and it turns out I was right not to promise, because — I can’t fix your knife.”

Xanthis’s nostrils flare. “Excuse me?”

Quentin tries to focus on what he needs to explain and not on his jackhammering heart. His instincts are as sure as they’ve ever been, but Jesus, she makes him fucking nervous. “Look, the knife can’t be mended by hand, because it’s magic. And not just the knife, but the way it broke — I mean you said it yourself, it didn’t break by accident, right? It broke because someone fucked up — no offense to your ancestor —”

“No breath shall be wasted,” she snarls, “in defense of that milksop pretender.”

“Sure,” Quentin says, “but — my point is, it wasn’t just a physical blow, it was — a magical injury, something that cuts right to the root of what the knife _is_. Because it was a gift, right, for — for your people, for your islands, it grants them power. So — you need magic to fix that kind of rupture, but my magic’s not enough. No magician’s is, actually, because — because it was a gift from a questing creature. That’s like, one step below a god, their magic follows its own rules, and — and human magic can’t override it. If the intention behind the gift is what was broken, then — there’s nothing I can do.”

“So your king beckoned me to Whitespire to disappoint me face to face?” Xanthis spares a disdainful glance for Margo, standing somewhere Quentin can’t see; he tries not to think of what her face is doing in return.

“No,” he says. “Or — not exactly. Because, uh — I do think I know how the knife can be fixed.”

“Oh?” She narrows her pale eyes. “And I suppose we are to chase the wicked quail all the way to the southernmost cove while your king strips our lands of the magic which is our birthright?”

This is apparently some totally hilarious reference to Fingerling lore, because her guards guffaw while she smirks at him. “Uh — no. Not literally, or — whatever that metaphor is supposed to convey, no.”

“Then what,” Xanthis says, voice dripping scorn, “ _magician?_ ”

Quentin takes a deep breath. “You’re going to fix the knife.”

Xanthis takes a step back, visibly offended. “I? You believe that I have the capacity to fix the royal knife of the first family of the Fingerlings — a gift from a questing creature generations old, entrusted to my bloodline and my land, guarded as a sacrament even after Themistolae’s cowardice — and I have chosen to hand this duty over to some Child of Earth who knows not the Vultures’ Craig from the Dungeon of Meliope? You believe my people are loyal to a dilettante atop the Jade Throne?”

He shakes his head. “No, of course not — uh, your highness — but — the knife is yours, by magic and by right. It’s your family, your throne, that it was gifted to, and I think — I think if there’s anyone that can — reach in, to where things are broken, and set it right — it’s got to be you. Because you’re the one who’s going to wield it, when it’s whole again. It was built for your hands.”

He’s caught her interest, he can tell. “An interesting hypothesis, magician. And yet contradictory. You say the knife needs magic and myself to be fixed, but I have no magic. If I did, surely I would not have wasted my own time with Whitespire’s continued failures.”

“So that’s what we’ve all been taught, right?” Quentin says. “That you either have magic or you don’t, and that if you were born in Fillory, on this planet that _is_ magic to its very core, then you don’t have it. The questing creatures and the mermaids and the fairies, they have their own magic, but human magic is something that gets brought to Fillory from elsewhere, by — Children of Earth, or whoever else manages to find their way here. And I know that that’s how it’s been for, like, generations, maybe centuries if not longer, but — I’ve been learning a lot about magic, lately. And the main thing I’ve learned is that — I’ve been wrong about magic, the whole time I had it.”

“Very reassuring,” she says, “to hear from the man to whom I entrusted our most holy object.”

“I know,” Quentin says, smiling a little, “but — just listen, okay? Because I’ve been wrong about what magic is and what it can be, and where it comes from, and — and I’m pretty sure I’ve been wrong about who has it, and how you get it. I think we’ve all been wrong about that, for a really long time. I don’t think it’s something you — have or you don’t. I think magic is for everyone. And some people get lucky, and it shows up for them, or someone tells them they have it, but — I think a lot more people can learn it, if they have the right teachers, if they find the right place to learn it in. And it’s hard, but — it’s worth it. So — so that’s what I’m proposing. I’ll teach you magic — not a lot, I can still run most of the spell — almost all of it, really — but just a little. Just enough to — to connect to the knife, and show it that — you’re the one who’s really trying to fix what was done.”

Xanthis regards him skeptically. “And why should I believe you?”

Quentin shrugs. “You don’t have to. But — the shortages are getting worse. Your people are suffering. And you seem pretty sure that having the knife would help them.”

“Do you presume,” she says, “to tell me how to rule?”

“Not at all,” he says, “but — I’m not sure what your alternative is, here.”

She purses her lips. “I could have my guards execute you and hang your head above our keep as a warning to insouciant outsiders.”

“Sure,” says Quentin, “but then you’d definitely never get the knife back, so.”

She studies him for a long moment. He swallows, wondering if he’s pushed her too far. She is a queen, after all. But then her lip curls into an expression that’s not quite a smile, but — close enough, maybe. For now. He just needs a little time. “Fine. I’ll indulge your experimentation.”

“Thank you,” he says, meaning it.

“So,” she drawls sardonically, “are we beginning our lesson?”

“Almost,” Quentin says. “I kind of need one more thing from you, first.”

“Beyond my forgiveness and my patience and my time?” she says. “You are a demanding instructor indeed.”

“Yeah, I’m a little high-maintenance,” Quentin says. “But, so — the thing is, Fillory is magic, like I said. The magic here is — it’s kind of a lot. And maybe I could still use it, to show you what you need to do, but — it’d be a lot harder, I’m pretty sure, because it’s like — when you’re learning something, you want some training wheels. Or — you probably don’t have those here, uh, but think of, like — you don’t train a soldier in actual battle, right, you do — military drills, or whatever.” Xanthis’s chin moves almost imperceptibly. Quentin chooses to take this as an indication that she doesn’t think he’s talking total nonsense. “So — I think it would help, like a lot, if you — and your guards, you know, whoever you want to bring — if you would be willing to Travel.”

The queen exchanges inscrutable glances with the woman at her left. “Travel where?”

“I think it would help,” Quentin says, “if you came to Earth.”

*

Penny drops them off a few blocks away from their final destination. “You good here?”

Quentin looks over Xanthis and the two members of her phalanx she’d designated to come along, impressively stoic for how bewildered they must be to find themselves suddenly on a street corner in Southern California. The glamour Eliot and Penny worked on them seems to have held across the interdimensional travel; to the passing eye, they look like a group of business professionals with weirdly impeccable posture. “Yeah, we should be fine. You guys should go get set up with the others, tell them we’re on our way.”

Penny nods, reaching for Margo’s hand. “I really hope your hunch is good as you say it is,” she says.

“We’ll see,” Quentin says. “But I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

Eliot says, “You sure you don’t want me to walk you over?”

Quentin smiles at him, dares to squeeze his hand quick. “I’m okay. But thanks.”

Eliot nods, accepting this, and rests a hand on Penny’s shoulder. Then Quentin is alone with the queen and her guards, wearing matching frowns of impatience. It’s kind of uncanny. “Is this meant to educate?” says Xanthis.

“Kind of,” Quentin says. “This is how it starts. Right now we’re standing somewhere — normal, for lack of a better word. It’s got magic, the way everywhere’s got magic, but — the magic’s not really doing anything here. You’d have to train as a magician for a while to learn to feel it.”

“As someone who is not a trained magician,” Xanthis says, “this bores me.”

“I know,” Quentin says, “but we’re — we’re about to get to the interesting part. I think.” He fucking hopes. “We’re going to start walking towards somewhere the magic is more — intense, or, or brighter, or — it’s just more intense. And I want you to see if you can — can feel _something_ , when we get there. Like —” He tries to think of a way to describe it to someone who’s never felt it, feeling like that Carver story about the cathedral. “Like if you watch the sunrise — before you see it, you see the world start to change, just because of the light. Or — I don’t know, maybe that’s not helpful. It’ll feel good, though. I think it will, anyway.”

Xanthis doesn’t look convinced, but she doesn’t order her guards to decapitate him either, so Quentin shakes himself a little and starts leading them down the street. He resists the urge to prompt her or check in, figuring if he tries to push it that’ll make it harder for her to pay attention to whatever she might feel, but he can’t quite stop himself from stealing glances at their faces as he ushers them safely through crosswalks and down the sidewalk towards the block, the force of the magic coming through to his own awareness quicker than usual, livelier and more sure even at a distance. Xanthis is impassive, but he can’t tell if she’s not feeling anything or if she’s too regal to reveal it on her face. He thinks he sees one of her guards startle slightly, about half a block past where Quentin usually starts picking up the magic if he’s looking for it, but it could be wishful thinking. Or she could be freaked out about, like, cars.

They’re almost at the fence, the ambient by then dancing like a symphony around them — Quentin can’t remember ever feeling it like this — and his nerves are coming back when Xanthis stops in her tracks, her guards copying her without missing a beat. “I…” she starts, trailing off. For the first time in their acquaintance she looks unsure.

Quentin tries not to look too excited about this development. “It’s not in your head,” he tells her. She fixes her eyes on him, unreadable. “It’s getting stronger, right? Or — brighter, louder, whatever. Whatever you want to call it, however you feel it — try to hold on to that, okay?”

She doesn’t say anything, but she gives him a small nod. Her guards exchange glances behind her before resuming their forward stance. Quentin takes a breath to steady himself, then leads them to the entrance.

At the lot magicians, hedges, adepts, whoever — _people_ are casting in a heated frenzy of playful spells, funny lights and odd strains of orchestration flickering into and out of existence, bursts of energy passing hand to hand. Nothing too intense, everything collaborative — for this part, Quentin had just wanted to get that quickening that he’s felt at the spellshares, the way magic grows when people work it together, fast and close. There are so many people here it stuns him to see it. Luisa and Rishi are there, along with the rest of the house and most of book club. So are his friends from New York, Eliot and Margo still dressed in their Fillorian finery as they swap towers of soap bubbles with Julia and Kady. Book Club Jenny is teaching Hannah and Imani and Edward the game she brought to the house ages ago while Imani’s parents work a soft music spell with Toni and Ray.

And that’s not even half of it. When he’d put out the call for help on Ley Line link, he’d expected half a dozen responses at most, maybe three of whom would actually show up — not a lot, but enough, he hoped, to provide some insurance on his plan. But the lot is teeming with people — local adepts he’s met at spellshares or other events, hedges he and Julia unmarked during their disastrous road trip, Jesus, almost two years ago now, people he’s visited with Penny in the past few months mending literal fences and asking about local needs, magicians he’s never interacted with but recognizes from their profile pictures, brought in by Twenty-Three and Alice’s contingent of Library Travelers, now dispersed and joining curiously in the casting. Quentin catches sight of Josh doing something to a leafy potted plant in the corner that Serena mirrors back at him; the woman the compass had identified late in her life is almost giddy practicing Illusion work with Cynthia.

For a moment he’s nearly overcome, looking at the scene, thinking: if he had to sit down and sketch out the beauty of all life right now, it would look like this. All this magic, all these people, here because he asked. Because they love him, or because he did them a favor once and they want to pay him back, or because they barely know who he is but they saw that someone needed help and figured they might as well be the ones to give it. Here because they care. That’s what it was, all along: the magic of caring, the magic of showing up. Magic the world is full of, if you stick around long enough to find it.

Quentin closes his eyes to focus himself. He has a job to do. When he opens them he turns to Xanthis, and he doesn’t need to ask her if she feels it; he can see it on her face, cracked open with some new delicateness, mouth hanging open, eyes unfocused. She’s breathing long and deep, like she’s trying to inhale whatever it is that’s happening around her. Quentin knows the feeling.

“So,” Quentin says, “that’s what magic feels like.”

He hasn’t really explained anything, but she gives a single reverent nod. Her guards are looking around amazed.

“Hey everyone,” Quentin says, giving the group an awkward wave. Most of them are too caught up in what they’re doing to notice, but Kady spots him and blasts a bullhorn that silences the crowd, dropping the intensity of the magic instantly. He hears Xanthis take in a sharp breath at the change; that’s a good sign. Quentin gets a bunch of waves back as people turn to look at him, which is also awkward but kind of funny. “Thanks for coming out today — I really appreciate it, and I think it’s already helping a lot. If you could just — hold tight, while we get ready for the next part, that’s be great. Uh, Luisa —?” He can’t find her in the crowd, but she emerges to hand him what he’d asked her to bring: a bag with the broken pieces of a smashed-up ceramic plate. “Thanks. Did you guys have a chance to practice together while you were waiting?”

She nods. “I think we’re all set.”

“Awesome.” Quentin turns back to Xanthis, gesturing for her to come over as he lowers himself to the ground. “We can actually sit, if that’s okay for you — I think that’ll make it a little easier to concentrate —”

Slowly, like she thinks she might be in a dream, Xanthis joins him on the ground. Her guards stand behind her.

“You just felt, like, a ton of magic, happening all at once,” Quentin says. “And — can you feel it still? How this place is — is different, than where we were before?”

“Yes,” she says. Her voice still has the steeliness of a queen.

“Great,” he says. “So what you need to do is — you don’t need to do anything _to_ it, for this, okay? Just — you just need to touch it. To call up your own magic — and I know you think you don’t have magic, but just try to believe that you do — and connect to, to the magic outside of you. And — I’m pretty sure the knife needs to be fixed in Fillory, since it’s made of Fillorian magic, but — we’re going to practice, before we head back, since it’s — clearer, here. So just — I’m going to cast a spell, or, or almost cast it — well, technically, all of us are going to almost cast it, but — anyway, just — the part of you that, that _feels_ it, what’s happening here, the way your eyes see or your ears hear — you’re just going to focus on that, okay? Almost like it’s a part of your body, that you’re — I don’t know, practicing a sword-fighting stance with, or — whatever, I don’t really know a lot about your military training.”

“It’s a little like that,” she says, quiet but steady. “Like — the days of my girlhood, my favored weapon in hand —” She flexes her fingers at the memory.

“Good,” Quentin says. “Whatever helps you find it, just — hold onto that, and — listen.” To the assembled crowd he says, “Okay, the Crabb’s variant I sent out, on my tempo — and remember, don’t go over the line to cast —”

He tuts the initiation sequence he’d added to adapt the spell to work collaboratively and give him more control. When he gets into the spell proper, he moves slowly, conscious of the dozens of hands mimicking his, keenly aware of the power starting to build in his hands. This is the part he’s most nervous about; he’d done a dry run with the house yesterday and it had gone pretty well, but he’s worried about finding the balancing point where the spell is bright enough to catch Xanthis’s nascent sixth sense, yet still simmering below its casting level.

It takes some doing. He can feel it teetering as more casters find his strand and join it, their magic bundling together with the natural strengthening that comes with collaboration, and he has to adjust the channel he’s carving to keep it from overflowing. A few times the ceramic pieces twitch in their bag and he drops out almost completely, staying just linked enough to corral the shape of it. It’s — fucking thrilling, god, he’s never worked so closely with so many people. He kind of can’t believe he has it in him to keep control.

But he does. He keeps it burning without sparking, hovering below the edge of being cast, tiptoeing closer and closer to the fullness of the spell, drawing out the full strength of the magic crackling in the pieces, that sense of _wanting_ , the silence that sounds like _almost_ , like _please_. He works it into the lot’s glowing ambient, the potential of the broken things and the possibility in his own hands and in the hands of every person weaving their magic in and that sense of blooming all around them, the fresh-apple taste of something like hope, watching Xanthis’s face and trying to keep room in his awareness for the magic he thinks, he _knows_ she can summon — waiting for that click, that latch, that shock of newness — she has to be able to feel it, moving this strong, clearer than he’s ever felt it, ringing like fucking church bells — her own must be coming, if they can give it space to grow —

Xanthis’s eyes flicker wide. “ _Oh_ —”

She swallows, looking doubtful, but Quentin can feel it, faint and uncertain but — he knows, he knows it has to be her — “Yeah,” he says encouragingly, “you’ve got it, it’s there —”

“I —” Her strand — the power that she’s never used before, her _magic_ that she’s never known she had the chance to make — flares again and Quentin hooks it, managing to hold it with the spell for one gleaming moment before it bursts into fruition and the plate snaps back together with startling ferocity and speed.

There’s a murmur in the crowd around them, but Quentin tries to tune it out, keeping focused on Xanthis’s face, struck with an awe he thinks he recognizes. “How are you feeling?”

She shakes her head slowly, eyes fixed on the mended plate between them. “That was magic?” she says. “That was a spell? I…” She bites her lip like she can’t bring herself to finish the question.

Quentin smiles, exhilarated. This is going to work; he can almost fucking taste it. “It’s a start,” he tells her. He tuts a quick spell to shatter the plate again, breaking it to mend. Then he lifts his chin to address the crowd. “Alright, guys, again on three.”

*

They practice again and again, mending and unmending under the sun, Quentin adjusting and readjusting the contours of the spell, diminishing his own power and calling for different sets of people to drop out as Xanthis’s grasp on reaching into the ambient slowly solidifies into something more sure. Quentin feels kind of bad for everyone gathered here with them, but he told Luisa to get everyone pizza and drinks on his dime when he blips off back to Fillory, so hopefully they’ll feel their time was appreciated. It’s been hours by the time Quentin is satisfied that Xanthis has opened her own gate to magic enough that they can use it for what they need, reliably joining the stream of the spell. With a glance at his phone to check the time, he leads her through a few more rounds, enjoying the excitement lighting up her regal face, before giving the crowd a last effusive thanks and gathering with the Fillory crew to let Twenty-Three travel them back to the garden outside Whitespire.

In Fillory the sun is starting to set, its slightly unreal watercolor gradient spilling brilliantly across the sky. They land right by the garden of broken objects, and Quentin lets himself take a moment to reach for Eliot’s hand and silently hold it tight. Lucky, lucky; he’s so lucky for everything that’s brought him this far.

Josh runs inside to fetch the materials while Quentin and Xanthis get situated by the clear patch of soil. Her imperial coolness has returned; she flicks a gaze over the painted sign of what might be interest or disdain. When Josh hands her a chip of the knife’s blade, though, some deep emotion swells in her pale eyes.

Quentin prepares the hole for the object to nestle into and gives her a cue to drop the piece inside. He starts to tut the initiating sequence, the way he did when he was fixing Hannah’s guitar, but he catches the way she’s looking at the piece of metal in the soil and aborts the casting. “Actually, could we maybe — have a little privacy?” It’s a request to the others who have lingered here — Margo and Eliot, Josh and Twenty-Three, the queen’s guards — but he says it straight to her. “If that’s okay with you? I just — magic is, it’s personal, sometimes, and this spell — especially is, and I — I just think it might go a little more smoothly, if it’s just you and me.”

He holds his breath as she thinks it over. He’s asking for a lot, he knows, from a queen. But whatever he’s given her already today must feel worth the chance, because she nods briskly and dismisses her guards with a curt gesture.

“I’ll be right inside if you need anything,” Margo says as she heads inside. Quentin doesn’t share the suspicion in her tone, but he feels warm receiving her protectiveness. Eliot doesn’t say anything on his way out — just squeezes his shoulder bracingly, a touch that says _I’m here_ , a touch that says _You’ve got this_.

Quentin’s got this. What’s left is what he’s good at: fixing things, making connections. Putting pieces together.

“Okay,” he says once they’re alone, “I’m going to start casting, and you’re going to do — just like you did when we were on Earth. Just — listening, and focusing, and trying to connect.”

Xanthisi nods, her mouth a firm line. Once again he takes up the opening sequence, working it slow and sturdy, more deliberate than it really needs to be, trying to make it clear for her. He’s expecting there to be an unpleasant adjustment as she starts to open up and hits Fillory’s thorny, churning ambient, but if Xanthis is thrown off, she doesn’t show it; maybe it’s different when you’re from here and it’s what you’re used to, whether you know it or not. It takes a few tries, once he feels her reaching, to get the two of them securely connected; she’s not as strong a caster as even Hannah was a few days in. But she doesn’t need to be, he’s pretty sure; she just needs to show up. That’s enough for him to wind her magic tighter with his, feeling both of their castings strengthen the way collaborative spells nearly always do, until he feels confident they can move forward with the spell.

“You’ve got it,” Quentin says, half-reinforcement, half-question; Xanthis nods, not quite definitively. “I’m going to move us to the next phase, and you just need to — hold on, and let it in, okay?” He tuts to open the bridge between his hands and the piece of metal under the dirt, working to stay steady and calm in the face of its now-familiar snarl, that peculiar stubborn brokenness that doesn’t want to be fixed, and he’s managing it, but once he starts drawing it into the spell, Xanthis’s magic backs away like she’s been burned.

“I — apologize,” she says, embarrassed. She shakes her head. “It — startled me, I —”

“Yeah, this is a weird one,” Quentin says. “It’s — kind of pissed off. But I think — I think it wants you, is the thing. You just need to show it you’re here, by sticking around.” He toys with the phrasing. If it were Hannah, or even one of his friends, he’d tell her she’ll be fine, she just needs to try, it’s okay, but — he has a hunch that’s not really her style. “Do you think you can handle that?”

As he hoped, the implied challenge causes her to sit up straight, eyes defiant. “Of course, magician. I am a queen. It is, as you said, my knife.”

“Right,” he says. “Good. Let’s go again.”

He starts the spell over. This time, she finds him more quickly and holds on more readily once the knife’s angry broken magic joins the power they’re channeling through their hands. Quentin keeps tutting through the shape of the spell, carrying more of it than he had with Hannah’s guitar. He’s rewritten the version he used with her to make Xanthis’s part as small as possible — just enough, he thinks, to let her leave her mark. Just enough to make it hers. “Now,” he says, “this part might sound kind of weird” — although, this is fucking Fillory; maybe not — “but I need you to — the spell needs you to ask it a question, okay? You’re going to ask the knife what it wants, and — this is the important part — you have to be okay with just — listening to the answer. Even though — like, just don’t decide what it is.”

Her face betrays no response to his instruction. She opens her mouth and in her deep, imperious tone asks, “What do you want?”

The knife shudders a burst of ugly magic like lightning striking a tree, twisted and charred, and the spell once more goes dark. “Shit,” he mutters.

Xanthis purses her lips. “I grow tired, magician, of these games.”

“I’m not playing a game,” Quentin says, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Look, I know it’s kind of freaky when you — open things up, that way, and get a glimpse of, of what it wants. But I told you, remember, at the start of this whole thing, that if I can fix this, it’s not gonna be exactly what it was, and — you need to let that happen.”

“I am aware,” she says stiffly.

There’s something in her voice — some hidden thing, something she doesn’t want to look at or say. He rakes his hands through his hair, trying to stay calm. This won’t work if he aggravates her more. Empathize, he reminds himself. “The knife broke,” he says, “because of — the dishonor of your ancestor, right?”

“Yes,” she says, and there it is again — a pinch, a deflection, a secret wound.

“That must be hard for you,” he says. “To have carried — your family’s shame, all this time.”

“I am a queen,” she says. “I carry my family’s legacy as I carry my scepter on the throne.” She’s not meeting his eyes.

“Yeah,” he says, “but it’s gotta be heavy, right? To have that — that stain on your history. To feel like —” His throat tightens. “Like that’s what defines you. Like no matter what you do, it won’t ever be more important than — this one really fucked up thing from the past. I bet, growing up — having this over your head, hearing it as the story of your family, the story of what you were inheriting and of, of the queen you were growing up to be — that must have hurt, to think — this is always going to be my story.”

Her chin twitches almost imperceptibly. She doesn’t speak.

“And I’m not going to lie to you,” he says. “It’s always going to matter, that the knife was broken. Whatever it becomes, on the other side of this — that’ll be part of what shapes it, forever. But — that doesn’t mean it can’t be whole. It can. It will be. But you need to — to let it. To make room for —” He swallows. “For all of it. All of the pain, and the shame, and the fear that this is how it’s going to be, forever — you have to let that in, and then — you’ll see. Then things will change. But it’s not going to work if you’re so busy running from that stuff that you can’t — tend to what you have. So can you just — give it another shot?”

Xanthis doesn’t look at him for a long time. Quentin’s stomach sinks as he wonders whether he’s blown his shot. But then she raises her face and says simply, “Yes.”

Opening sequence; latching their strands together; working through the steps of the spell, of the magic that he designed and is learning to shape still; her voice, quieter this time, almost subdued: “What do you want?”

The knife’s magic sparks like a live wire in a storm, thrashing wildly. Quentin bites his lip to keep from talking. She’s a queen, he reminds himself; let her do her fucking thing.

Xanthis doesn’t share whatever she’s thinking, but he can tell by listening to the magic that some exchange is happening. He’s getting flashes of — light and shadow, terror and the thin trembling line of hope. Shades of pain, marrow-deep and ancient, raw and red still, and something else — pain like sore muscles, like bones aching as they stretch away from childhood. Torrents of rain and soft light filtering through the drifting clouds.

When the magic has settled to a soft vibration like a violin bow drawn across a single low note, Xanthis is crying softly, two long lines of tears crossing her face. Quentin ducks his eyes as he closes out the spell, trying to give her some privacy. His heart lifts, tutting the last few motions; he won’t promise, he can’t guarantee, but — the spell feels good, this time. That rightness of edges joining, like a key slipping into its lock — it’s here, he thinks, satisfaction building in him like magic in his hands. That sense of making something good.

After the final wingtip-cross, he sits, eyes on the ground, feeling awkward about how to proceed. from here.

“Thank you,” she says, in a softer voice than he’s heard her use yet.

Quentin looks up, surprised. “Uh, you’re welcome. I should say — I’m optimistic, but we don’t technically know yet if it worked. We’ll find out when you come back to dig it up when the lunar cycle’s done.”

Xanthis shakes her head. “Not for the knife. For —” She holds still, considering, pale eyes still a little red. “You speak as one who understands the burden I have inherited and borne. The weight of what I have shouldered for the love of my people.”

And Quentin doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to be a queen living in the shadow of her forefather’s treason, but — he does know something, about living with fear. About a story that feels like a cage, and shame so deep it’s almost part of your body. He knows about what it takes, to stop running from that, and what happens after: the pain that feels like it will kill you, the change that starts when you realize you’ve survived. “Yeah,” he says. “I get it.”

She gives him a small smile. It doesn’t feel like the smile of a queen. “Thank you for that.”

Something shifts inside him, to hear her say it — like the spell in its final moments, that key in its lock. He spent so fucking long waiting for his pain to mean something, and it’s not like now he knows it was all worth it, but — this means something, even if it’s small. Not that he hurt, but that he found a way to weave it into something he could give to someone else who needed it. To turn his broken pieces into something that could make someone else more whole. It’s not like it was all worth it, but this part is worthwhile.

*

Back in the castle, once the representatives from the Fingerlings have departed and Margo and Quentin are alone, she turns to him and asks, a little too tight to be business-like, “How’d it go?”

Quentin chews at his bottom lip. “Do you want my responsible answer, or my real one?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Let’s go responsible first.”

“It’s a totally untested application of an idea I’m not even a hundred percent sure is true, on a spell no one but me has ever done and that I wouldn’t even call myself an expert on,” he says with a shrug. “Based on certain principles of both cultivation and repair, and what we know of Fillorian lore, there are valid reasons to believe it’ll be more successful than previous attempts, but — we won’t know till we’re pulling up what we found.”

Margo nods. “So what’s your real answer?”

Quentin can’t keep the smile off his face. “We’ve got it. _Maybe_ not this time, but at most a few more tweaks will get the next round where it needs to be. And I think after what she experienced today, Xanthis will let me take as long as I need for another try. But I don’t think we’re going to need it.”

Margo wrinkles her nose in a victorious grin, fists in the sky in one of her rare unvarnished moments of delight. “That’s what I like to fucking _hear_. God, Eliot and I really bet on the right neurotic first-year horse.” She gives him an even rarer Margo hug and he laughs, allowing himself enjoy the moment. He just did something super helpful and also potentially like totally revolutionary or whatever. Why the fuck shouldn’t he feel good? “Let’s go hit the celebration.”

“The what now?” Quentin says, following as she turns on her heel.

They slip through the clock into the penthouse, where the others — his friends — drop their conversations to raise a loose toast as he walks into the room. Quentin rolls his eyes, embarrassed, but Margo nudges him as she shoves a glass into his hand. “None of that. Be bashful about your own shit if you want, but that’s not going to fly when we’re talking about saving my goddamn kingdom from a pain-in-the-ass invasion off the southern coast.”

“Technically I haven’t saved your kingdom from anything yet,” Quentin points out. “But — I probably have, so. I guess that counts.”

“Fuck yeah it counts,” says Josh.

“I second Margo,” Eliot says, slipping into place at Quentin’s side. “Maintaining our hard-won planetary peace is not an achievement about which shyness shall be permitted.”

Quentin takes a sip of his champagne, enjoying the bubbling drink and the warmth where Eliot’s arm is wrapping around his waist. “That’s actually — kind of not the coolest part, for me.”

“No?” Margo says skeptically. “What exactly ranks higher?”

“I mean I’m — thrilled, obviously, if I’ve managed to help you guys out,” Quentin says. “To help Fillory out. But, like —” He swallows, nervous now that he’s saying it out loud. It’s so big he hasn’t really let himself look at it yet. “We’ve been having these conversations about — here on Earth, right, people, schools and hedges and whoever else is out there, they have — systems, and tools, for the detection of magic, for finding adepts, and they’re — they’re incomplete, we know that. And we’ve been trying to think about, who’s been missing, when we look for magic, and how do we get them in? And — on Earth, anyone we find that’s gone under the radar — we can’t ever really know, right, that it wasn’t just a flaw of the mechanism we were using to locate magic. Anyone could be — a magician in waiting, using magic that we didn’t know we left out. But Fillory’s not like that, right? It’s built by the gods into the structure of the world — the land is magical, the people are _not_. So — so if this worked, if someone born on Fillory, descended from locals as far back as their family goes, if that person was able to connect to magic, even a little bit, then —”

“That changes the whole conversation,” Julia finishes for him. 

Quentin meets her eyes and raises his glass. “Exactly.”

“Holy shit,” Kady says, leaning forward. “So if you’re right, then — it doesn’t fucking matter if we can find people who might be able to do magic. Because that could be anyone.”

“Damn, Coldwater,” says Penny. “Way to bury the fucking lede.”

A thrill dances down Quentin’s spine at the hugeness of the idea. “I mean, again, I could be wrong.”

“You don’t think you are, though,” Alice says shrewdly.

Quentin shrugs. “I really don’t. I mean — you’ve all worked collaborative spells, you know how you can — _feel_ the other person’s magic. I felt that today. And I think — shit, guys, I think this is a big deal. Not that anything we did today was a big deal, I mean she was working with magic that’s like semi-divinely ordained to connect to her bloodline or whatever weird fairy tale nonsense, and I didn’t even teach her like an actual spell, and for all we know it’s literally only possible to, I don’t know, open someone cold like that at this one weird ex-haunted house in California, but — it’s the idea of it, right? What it means _could_ be possible. It’s not a huge step forward on its own, but it’s —”

“Proof of concept,” Eliot supplies. Quentin squeezes his hand.

“We could be thinking way bigger,” Kady says. “Like, life-changingly bigger, for potentially everyone on Earth.”

“Not just Earth,” says Margo, “if you’re telling me there’s a chance we can train Fillorians in magic, that’s got to be a game-changer for dealing with the goddamn shortages.”

“Not just Fillory, either,” Alice says, “I mean the Library has branches connecting worlds across dimensions, the portals at the Neitherlands alone —” She cuts herself off, silencing ringing through the room as they all turn it over in their minds: the edge they’re peering over, the potential brewing in this room.

“So if this pans out,” Julia says, “where do we go from here?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says. He can’t picture it — the future spreading open for them, wider than they ever knew to look. “But I’m psyched to figure it out.”

*

As things wind down for the evening, Eliot, arm draped comfortably around Quentin’s shoulders as they sit on the couch, asks, “It’s a school night — do you have to head back soon?”

Quentin shakes his head. “Luisa’s driving Hannah tomorrow — I figured things are stable enough that I can take a special occasion to hang out here. Where are we sleeping?”

It gives Quentin a pleasant little flutter to ask it like that — casually, like it’s something he can assume. From the half-second beat before he answers, Eliot feels it, too. “I’d been planning to head back through, but if you’re staying — it’s kind of a special occasion for me, too. Might be nice to — make a night of it, over here.”

“I’d like that,” Quentin says, smiling. It’s kind of idiotic, because he would like anything Eliot wanted to do together, but — whatever, it’s still true.

In Eliot’s room Quentin kisses him feeling giddy, lighter than air, drunk with love and high on possibility, thrilled by the rush of the day and the expanse of potential blooming in him and every ordinary thing here for his eyes and his hands and his ears: his boyfriend’s bedroom and Eliot’s long, long chest, his sturdy hands cradling Quentin’s neck and the light taste of champagne lingering on his tongue, the penthouse’s aggressively white walls and Ellie Kemper’s memoir on the nightstand, an elaborately beaded bookmark dangling from its place halfway through the pages, another reminder that Eliot brings beauty with him wherever he can. He pushes Eliot forward, maybe a little impatiently, nudging at him until he sits back on the bed so Quentin can crawl into his lap, enamored with the sense of Eliot in his hands, in his arms, under his body. His for the wanting.

“I kind of thought,” Eliot says, a little breathless as Quentin sucks a tender spot at his elegant neck, pushing his scarf down to expose more of him to the air, “you might be tired, after such a big day, but — evidently not.”

Quentin huffs a laugh against his skin. “Yeah, not quite.” He kisses Eliot’s lips again, opening wide against his mouth, tonguing deep until he’s had a temporary fill. “I mean, it is like three hours earlier, California time. But that’s not even it, I think. Mostly I just feel —” Unbelievably powerful, bursting with joy, horny as hell, overwhelmed with all he has and how much more he wants, still, and how it doesn’t hurt. “So fucking awake, and so fucking crazy about you, and —” He cuts himself off to kiss Eliot again, enjoying how easy it is to lay bare his eagerness for Eliot’s welcoming hands, the way just a little grace is falling out of Eliot’s movements replaced by something closer to need, breath catching in his throat as they kiss like it’s been years instead of days.

Quentin grinds against him a little, more to assess the situation than for his own benefit; Eliot’s dick is stirring to attention, and at the soft throaty noise Eliot makes when Quentin shifts his hips against him the coming attractions click into place. He loves Eliot so much, and he feels like he could do fucking anything, and those strands of power and desire are quickening his blood until he feels lightheaded with how badly he wants — to make Eliot feel good. To take care of him the way Eliot is so good at taking care of other people, to spoil him fucking silly. Quentin’s pretty sure he feels right now the best a person has ever felt, and he wants to spread that, like magic, pour his own supernatural ebullience into Eliot’s body and his heart, because Eliot deserves every atom of that and more.

He starts undoing the top buttons of Eliot’s flowing silk shirt, mentally mapping out somewhere enticing and familiar for them to go: Eliot undressed but maybe not all the way, artfully disheveled in that way Quentin finds just fucking devastating, Quentin on his knees between his impossibly long legs, his slutty mouth sucking Eliot down as far as he can take it, Eliot’s hand tangled roughly in his hair as he tells Quentin how good he’s being between wordless grunts. Quentin shudders, getting harder just imagining the scene. But then he starts unwinding Eliot’s stupid fucking scarf, the better to have full access to Eliot’s chest, and a new image stops him with a jolt in his stomach.

He pauses, unsure. They’ve never done this, at least not together; he doesn’t know if Eliot would like it. It’s not the kind of thing Eliot’s ever him asked for. But Quentin thinks — he thinks it might be fun, to try. And Eliot’s not going to be, like, mad at him for asking. He’s not worried about that.

He’s not afraid of anything.

“Hey,” Eliot says, pulling back minutely, “you okay?”

Quentin smiles at him. He’s so sweet, so loving, so brain-obliteratingly hot. “You have really pretty eyes,” he says instead of answering.

Eliot blinks self-consciously, long lashes fluttering up and down. “Thank you?”

“I’m okay,” Quentin says. “I’m fucking great, actually. I was just thinking — we don’t have to, obviously, but what if —” And he lifts the scarf up from around Eliot’s neck and brings it up, slowly, above the bridge of his nose, bringing the ends to meet at the back of his head — liking already the way his curls tumble over the dark red fabric — and holding there, keeping it loose enough that it drapes so Eliot can still see over the top of it, just sketching out the shape so his intention is clear.

“— Oh.”

Eliot’s voice is a little funny; Quentin’s not sure how to read it. He waits, patient, for Eliot to give him something more. Watches as the idea wends its way into Eliot’s mind, into his body; studies the way his lips part slightly and his breath gets shallow, eyes gazing at Quentin with a darkness shading into curiosity, maybe into hunger. Feels Eliot’s fingers dig in with a jerk at Quentin’s hips, as if of their own accord. Sees him take a long shuddering breath and relax on the exhale, like some inner knot has come loose. Like he’s giving himself permission to say —

“Yeah.”

Quentin shivers at the sound: just the one word, husky and bare, uncharacteristically terse for Eliot, who fucking loves to talk in bed. He likes that — the notion that he’s brought them somewhere Eliot doesn’t yet know what to say. Slowly he pulls the scarf taut but not tight around Eliot’s eyes and ties it in place, taking his time to savor the way Eliot tilts his head back, revealing his elegant throat. The electricity buzzing into being between them, like a spell, the two of them caught in a net they’re weaving together. There’s a spell he could use to fasten it in place, but — Quentin kind of likes the idea of doing without, for this. He likes knowing the only reason it’s there is because he asked, and Eliot said yes. Yes to placing himself in Quentin’s hands, letting Quentin give and take — whatever he wants.

“If you’re waiting for my permission,” Eliot says, too strained to quite pull off languid, “don’t.”

That’s such a dementedly tempting thing to say that it takes Quentin a moment to gather his wits to respond. “I was just enjoying the view.”

Eliot says, “What do you see?”

Fuck. Quentin swallows. “I see you waiting for me. Waiting for me to decide — what I’m going to do. How I’m gonna blow your mind.”

Eliot breathes a laugh. “You’re off to a strong start.”

Quentin surprises himself with what comes out next. “I know.”

Right thing to say: Eliot draws a sharp breath in. “I can see that, too: how much you want me. Want this. To just let me —” He starts unbuttoning the rest of Eliot’s shirt, letting himself stare frankly at Eliot’s chest and abdomen as they come into view, the soft tufted hair and the dark trail downwards, his sternum moving up and down, up and down with the air. “You’re so hot it’s honestly kind of fucked up. Obviously I want to look.”

It’s funny; Eliot loves to hear this kind of shit, always has, but he’s biting his lip like it’s the first time anyone has ever said it to him. Like the fact that he can’t reciprocate, that he’s the only one on display, makes it more — personal, secret, real. Like there’s something hot and scary and good about the fact that he has to just — sit there, and let himself be adored.

“Don’t worry about — don’t worry about anything,” Quentin says. “I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen next, but — it’s going be to fucking good. You know I know how to do that. So just — trust me, okay?”

Eliot says, “I always do, Q.”

Quentin guides the shirt off his arms, enjoying more than he’d honestly expected the slow, dreamlike way Eliot moves in response to his touch, uncertain yet obliging. His pulse is pounding, the adrenaline of novelty almost as intense as nerves; he likes that, too, he realizes. He trails a finger down the length of Eliot’s torso, then on a whim follows the same trail with his tongue, standing to bend over awkwardly so he can reach. Eliot cries out softly the second Quentin’s mouth makes contact with his skin and Quentin chases that sound all the way down to his waistband. He gets on his knees, which still seems like a great idea, maybe an even better one now, nestling in between Eliot’s legs, nosing against Eliot’s crotch and letting himself feel the curve of Eliot’s hard-on against his face.

Eliot lets out a high noise; Quentin takes that as encouragement to open up Eliot’s pants and tug at the waistband so Eliot will lift his hips enough for Quentin to slide them down, all the way down Eliot’s hairy legs and past his feet in argyle socks which Quentin takes a moment to roll off. He brings his face back to Eliot’s groin, noticing a tiny wet spot on his briefs that makes his own dick throb; inspired by the sight he mouths at Eliot’s cock through his white fabric while Eliot breathes like a person struggling to keep control. Good, Quentin thinks with a hunger that startles him; that’s where he wants Eliot, fraying until he has to let go. Getting impatient now, he maneuvers to get Eliot’s underwear off quickly and gives himself one moment to appreciate the sight before him — Eliot sitting straight, eyes hidden, dick thick and erect and dark, waiting for Quentin. For his mouth, his hands, his whole store of secret knowledge about how to give Eliot what he wants.

“You’re fucking gorgeous,” Quentin whispers, and takes him in before Eliot has a chance to reply.

“Oh, _fuck_ , Q,” Eliot says, rough and loud, “oh fuck, fuck, _fuck_ —”

Quentin hums in happy agreement with his lips a tight ring around Eliot’s cock. Fuck indeed: it’s stupid how easy it is to feel this good, on the floor on his knees for Eliot which (some fucked up voice hisses deliciously in the back of his mind) is where he belongs, loving the salt-warm taste of Eliot’s softest skin and the feel of it as he runs his tongue up and down and the way Eliot keeps cursing and calling his name and starting to draw Quentin’s hair into his fist like he’s going to pull and then slackening his grip as though he’s too distracted to follow through. He’s ragingly hard by now but ignoring the ache to focus on blowing Eliot like it’s his job, which makes the whole thing even hotter.

Or — it makes it hotter for him, definitely: the denial that lets him feel like he’s fucking serving the guy he loves. But — Quentin considers as he keeps pumping his head up and down — _does_ that make it hotter for Eliot? Sometimes, probably; Eliot likes to be in charge, likes for Quentin to find ways to prove how bad he wants him. But that stuff is always for Quentin, too. Tonight Quentin wants to take all his buoyant energy and use it to say to Eliot, naked and trusting in his private darkness, _See? I can take care of you, too_.

With some reluctance, he lifts his face off of Eliot’s dick, bringing his hand to wrap around the base of it, friendly-like. “You’re so good to me,” he says.

“ _That’s_ what you’re thinking about right now?” Eliot says.

“Yeah,” says Quentin, “because, like — so I was thinking I’d blow you while you were blindfolded and that would be, you know. Fun.”

“I’m definitely having fun,” Eliot says, “if that was your concern.”

“No, I know,” Quentin says, idly massaging Eliot’s balls, “but — I don’t know, El, you’re so goddamn considerate it’s kind of unbelievable — I mean I know I’ve been saying this a lot but you really do give me just, like, everything I want —”

“No complaints there,” Eliot murmurs.

“— and it just occurred to me that maybe, if I really want you to sit back and let me handle things — then maybe, first I should fuck your face,” he says. Eliot’s middle tenses in an appealing way. “For _you_ , you know. Just to kind of get me out of the way. And then we can get back to this, and you can really, like, relax. How does that sound?”

“Good plan,” Eliot says faintly.

“Yeah, I’m really on a roll lately.” Quentin stands up and presses a palm to Eliot’s chest. “Let’s get you lying down.”

Obediently Eliot shimmies himself backwards on the bed, kicking his feet up and angling his body until he’s fully on the mattress, looking shockingly — _available_. His long slender body lying back, waiting for Quentin to do whatever he’s going to do. “Fuck,” Quentin whispers. “Fuck me, El, I can’t —” He gives a helpless laugh. “I kind of still can’t believe you actually look like that, and I actually get to fuck you. I mean, Jesus.”

He strips quickly, hurrying to climb into bed with Eliot and touch him all over — to kiss along his slender legs, bite gently at the skin beneath his navel, run his hands along Eliot’s ribs, his sides, his hips, loving the way Eliot’s body bends and turns for his touch. Eliot reaches his arms around Quentin to spread his enormous hands along Quentin’s back, dig his nails into the underside of Quentin’s ass. For a few minutes Quentin lets himself sink into the heat of skin on skin, the room filling with the smell of sweat and sex, the two of them rutting messily against each other too needy to worry about doing it right. He loves that he gets to have all of it, the dazzling sight of Eliot spread out blindfolded beneath him and the sloppy making out that’s all the better for the disjointed spots where it’s not that good, where their eagerness gets the better of them or their arousal short-circuits their coordination.

“I could come like this,” he says into Eliot’s ear. “Just your fucking — body, your sweat — I love that so much —”

“Fuck,” Eliot moans, “I love you —”

“I love you,” Quentin says, “and I could do that, or — I could sit back and jerk off on you, coming all over while you couldn’t even see —”

“ _Fuck_ —”

“I could do anything,” he breathes. It feels like magic words. “Anything, and you’d like it — that’s how good you are you to me, that’s how much you want me —”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “I — anything — fuck, Q —”

“But I had a plan,” Quentin says, pushing himself upright. “And someone told me it was a good plan, so. I guess I should stick to it.”

Eliot drops his jaw open sharply; Quentin stares for a second, mesmerized by the invitation. That warm dark spot, asking his cock in. He shifts his knees forward, eyes on Eliot’s face the whole time. Eliot can’t see, Quentin realizes as if it’s new information; he can only wait, and trust.

 _Fuck_.

When their positions have been reversed, Eliot has thrust his cock into Quentin’s mouth with no warning, which obviously made Quentin go totally nuts; that’s not really Eliot’s style on the other end, though. He brings his dick to Eliot’s cheek as a kind of hello, gratified by the tiny whimper that escapes Eliot’s throat. “You really want this,” he says, intending it as a sexy line but sounding about as awed as he feels.

“I really fucking do,” Eliot says. “Is that what you were waiting for? You want me to tell you how hungry I am for your fucking cock?”

Quentin laughs. It sounds like something he would say. “No, I was just being polite.” Then he shifts his angle and brings the head of his dick to Eliot’s parted lips before shoving it inside.

“Oh _fuck_ ,” he says, rolling his hips slowly in and out while Eliot moans around his cock, “fuck, you’re so good at this, fuck, _El_ —” He can’t stop staring down at where he’s fucking into Eliot’s gorgeous mouth, the weird peace on Eliot’s face as he gratefully accepts each thrust in, the red line of the scarf reminding Quentin that there’s nothing in Eliot’s world beyond what he can touch and taste and feel and hear, that nothing exists for him beyond _Quentin_ filling up his senses, Quentin’s cock on his tongue and hips under his gentle hands and voice groaning at how fucking good this is — there’s nothing but Quentin here for him, and Eliot fucking loves that —

“You love this,” Quentin pants, mouth running away from conscious thought entirely, “you love this, you love me, you love — I’m close, El, I’m so close, I’m gonna come all over your fucking mouth and you’re gonna love that too —”

And the thing is that Eliot really _is_ the most considerate person who ever lived, because just as Quentin’s feeling like he’s about to have an aneurysm from how good this is, Eliot without instruction or warning raises his hand and brings it down on Quentin’s ass in a swift _smack_ — 

“ _Ah_ —” Quentin cries, balls tightening, abs clenching, hips jerking deep into Eliot’s mouth —

— Eliot gives him another smack, shockingly hard, the clap of it ringing sharp and clear — and one more in the same still-stinging place and Quentin’s done, spilling down Eliot’s working throat.

Quentin pulls out, breathing hard. Eliot is lying in the same position as before, still and patient. He bends over to press a kiss to Eliot’s forehead, nudging his bangs away where they’re stuck to his damp skin. “I love you.” He hasn’t gotten tired of saying it. He doesn’t think he ever will. 

“I love you, too,” Eliot says. Quentin waits for him to add something like, _But if you don’t suck my cock soon I’m going to commit justifiable homicide_. He doesn’t, though. He just waits. Like he knew Quentin meant it when he said it was going to be good. Like to Eliot, Quentin is a person who makes good things happen.

“Okay,” Quentin says. “Now we can get back to more important topics.”

Eliot says, “Insert smart-mouthed response I’m too turned on to come up with here.” He’s such a dweeb, he’s the greatest person alive.

Quentin scoots back to resume sucking Eliot’s still-hard dick, shivering a little even as hormonally depleted as he is to think of Eliot’s body wanting and wanting all through the intervening activities. Drained of his own biological urgency, it’s easy now to take his time, bringing Eliot’s head into his mouth and lingering there while he hears Eliot’s breath quicken, moving down in a long, slow motion and dragging his tongue deliberately along the underside as he comes back up.

He does love this: Eliot coming apart in his grasp, hips bucking ungracefully and thighs twitching inwards as Quentin licks and sucks at his perfect cock, the wrecked way he says _Q_ when Quentin fights back his gag reflex to rub the head of Eliot’s cock against his soft palate. Quentin holds there for a moment, enjoying the strain and the sounds coming from Eliot’s throat. Then he commits to working fast and hard, building up speed until Eliot’s body starts matching his and with a series of wild uncontrolled thrusts he comes, bitter and salty, in Quentin’s mouth.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Eliot says when he’s caught his breath.

He’s still wearing the scarf around his eyes. For some reason that sends a rush of tenderness through Quentin. Quentin moves to lie beside him and lifts it off his beautiful face. “Good idea?”

“Great fucking idea,” Eliot says, too worn through to be cute about it. Quentin snuggles up against his side, appreciating how automatically Eliot loops an arm around his shoulders. He’s naked in bed with the person he loves and he’s exhausted and today at least he’s a person who made some good things happen. Tomorrow he’ll wake up and there will be things to do and plans to make, but right now he can’t imagine wanting anything more than this.

*

It’s a relief to have his brain and schedule cleared up once he gets back to San Diego. Quentin’s Traveling into Fillory for daily maintenance, but with the spell in the rearview he can keep thoughts of the knife contained, making space for reconnecting with the rest of his life and giving him room to breathe. His days are busy still, but they feel less crowded without thoughts of the knife insistently filling every idle crevice like weeds. He joins Rishi and Luisa for actual lunch breaks instead of shoving some leftovers into his mouth while staring bleary-eyed at his computer screen; he goes back to yoga for the first time in a while. He looks forward to picking Hannah up from school instead of trying to bury the guilty sense that he’s tearing himself away from something important. She shrugs when he asks her how school was and hooks her phone up to the speaker to play My Bloody Valentine and looks surprised and a little impressed when he knows the album — _Feel, I’m alive — you will see why I’m alive…_

He starts working on Ley Line stuff again, keeping an eye out for people asking for help he thinks he can give or sending introductions when he spots a request he thinks someone he knows might be suited to assist with. Alice has a set of Travelers checking in every day now, and he likes seeing people make plans to meet up hundreds of miles from their home or posting pictures from a day spent hex-breaking. He catches wind of herbalism projects starting in safehouses that have the lawn space to host them, a series of trainings in basic personal wards some Featherstone alumni are offering in Helena, a mobile library based in Baton Rouge posting shots of their shelves filled with donated spellbooks ready for new homes. He and Luisa drive down to a house in Point Loma to look over their security and wind up staying for dinner and promising to hang out again soon. There’s something grounding about watching the handles in the app become familiar, being able to put more faces to names and voices to text, catching exchanges between people who were strangers to each other but now talk like allies. It’s like they’re really building something here, something bigger than a digital platform and a series of favors. He likes it — being part of something good and growing, having good work to do and believing that he can do it, if he just keeps showing up. He likes looking in the mirror and seeing someone he trusts. Someone solid and capable and alive.

*

“I know we said we thought tomorrow would be a good day for the malachite and the Minoan rune sequence,” Quentin says, “but when I closed out today it felt — I don’t know, kind of needy. I was wondering if it might need something more active.”

“Hmmm.” Josh scans the cabinet’s shelves of glass jars thoughtfully. “We can toss in some dried cinquefoil — it plays nicely with the passive minerals, gives them some pizzazz. I think we should keep those runes, though — they’re more potent than you might expect. But if it felt — would you say needy like angsty, or needy like wilty, or needy like thirsty?”

“Uh…” Quentin tries to match up the magic he read under the soil to one of those categories. The knife has been calmer this round by far, but it’s retained its tempestuous streak. “I guess — wilty with a hint of angsty?”

“Yeah,” Josh says with a smile like this makes perfect sense to him, “give the Minoan sequence a shot. We can work it together if you’re worried about the power, but it casts a versatile net if you can get it to latch. Worst case scenario, it’s useless and we do need to call in something with more oomph, but I think we have enough time that it’s no big deal to wait another day on moving the next step up the ladder.”

“Okay,” Quentin says, running through the possibilities. “Casting it jointly sounds good. Thanks for the advice.” He says that to Josh what feels like constantly these days, and means it every time. Sometimes when he remembers how obnoxiously eager he’d been to dismiss Josh out of hand, he wants to go back in time and smack himself upside the head, saying: _You’d be fucked without him. Get your head out of your ass and stop being a dick_. Other times he remembers what Margo said, the similarity she’s always seen between them that set his nerves on edge, and he — still kind of wants to give himself a smack, but maybe followed by an encouraging nudge to the shoulder, or something. Josh is a huge nerd who wants to make friends and help people, and he’s too busy actually doing that to feel sorry about it. Quentin’s getting better at that last part.

“You working on anything solo right now?” Josh says.

“No,” Quentin says, “I missed the last new moon because I was too exhausted from getting everything together for this to set up anything at home. I’m hoping to get a set ready for the next one, though — the last batch I did came back with some interesting results.”

“The place you had us meet you and Xanthis at,” Josh says, “have you thought about incorporating that into your work?”

“The lot?” Quentin raises an eyebrow, surprised. “No. Do you think I should?”

Josh shrugs. “I think it’s worth a shot. When we were there I was talking with some Naturalists in the area and they added me to their group chat” — Quentin smiles; of course they did — “and they haven’t done much there, yet, but they’re definitely noticing some — weird shit. Cool shit. Fortified auras, statistically unlikely mutations, that kind of thing. Maybe not quite the direction you’re heading in with your research, but — might be fun to try.”

A funny buzz flutters in Quentin’s stomach at the casual way Josh says _your research_. Like that’s just a thing Quentin has. And yeah, it’s just Josh, but — Josh isn’t exactly just Josh anymore, to Quentin. Quentin, like, respects him or whatever. “I don’t know that I really have a direction — kind of just messing around, seeing what turns up.” He still has Professor Green’s business card sitting in his desk drawer, he remembers; he should email her, now that he has the mental energy for it.

Josh gives a knowing smile. “Isn’t that the fun part? When you have the basics down, and you can just — play?”

Quentin remembers the times he’d hated trying to get the spell to work in the first place, how Josh had sung the praises of the fucking process and Quentin had wanted to throw his phone into the Pacific Ocean because he didn’t want to have fun; he wasn’t sure fun was a thing he was capable of having. He wanted to know, the way he’d convinced himself he’d known all he needed to know about who Josh was and what he had to offer, about who Quentin was and what he could do; he wanted to be sure. Then he’d figured out the spell, and it turned out he still didn’t know everything; that was only the start. And it feels so much better here, dazzled with the expanse of what he doesn’t know, content to believe the future is a place for learning. There’s so much to discover, still. “It’s the fucking best.”

*

“So mending spells are always going to require focus,” Quentin says. “Generally as you’re tutting, you’re going to want to keep kind of a mental map in your head of where the pieces are.”

Hannah and Edward nod at him with matching expressions of such earnest seriousness Quentin has to fight back a smile.

“Wait,” says Edward, “it’s the wrist and then the crooked index, right? Or the other way around?”

“Wrist first,” Quentin says. “Typically in a tutted spell you should think of it as leading with the wrist work, even if it’s kind of happening all at once.”

“That’s what sets up the like — axes for your casting, right?” says Hannah.

Quentin smiles at her. “Nicely remembered.” She shrugs, ducking her head without quite managing to hide her smile. “Okay, if you don’t have any other questions for me, you can get to practicing.”

They’re good kids, he thinks, watching their fingers work through the motions as they stare intently at the snapped-in-half pencils on the table in front of them. The first few rounds he doesn’t bother to check for improvements; by now they’ve all accepted that it’s worth just taking the time to get the sequence fluid in your muscles and joints before you start refining the actual casting. Once their hands seem to have the shape of it, Quentin keeps a closer eye on their movements, offering feedback on keeping their angles consistent or adjusting their wrist-to-wrist measurement at the onset.

He always likes watching them get a little closer to making magic their own, but there’s a sentimental appreciation to today’s assignment — the foundation of repair work, the first spell he’d ever cast that let him believe this world might really be his. Watching the two of them practice contentedly side by side, correcting each other’s tuts and dissolving into laughter when one of them releases a useless bubble of energy instead, is a stark contrast to his memories of his first year at Brakebills: all those stress-filled nights hunched over his homework, the constant fear that he wouldn’t be able to prove he belonged there after all and the best thing that had ever happened to him would be over as suddenly as it had begun. He’s glad he can give them a better start than he had. Maybe it’ll make it easier for them to keep the right balance between magic and the rest of you, if they don’t feel like magic is something they have to fight to deserve. He’s glad he can give himself this, too: the chance to write over those anxious Brakebills memories. A glimpse of the better world they’re trying to make real.

Hannah’s pencil twitches — a small motion, but more than they’ve managed yet. She lets out a little squeal of victory, and Edward drops what he’s doing mid-tut to clap for her. Then they keep trying, brows furrowed in concentration, unbothered by the struggle. Enjoying the process. They belong in this world because they want to, and no one’s given them any reason to doubt that. As long as Quentin can help it, no one ever will.

*

He’s trying to stay sensible and realistic about the spell’s progress, but it’s tough. Each day he comes back to Fillory and the magic he reaches for is — not settled, exactly, but closer to something like peace. Vibrant, still, but in a shape he can trace the smooth edges of. Like the ocean on a clear day, the unbroken surface harboring uncountable currents beneath.

Quentin closes out his check-in with a final infusion of the mending stream, a re-up he doesn’t think it really needs but figures is worth adding just in case, and pushes himself to his feet to find that he’s being watched. “You know, if I were the jittery sort, you would have given me half a heart attack just now.”

“I like watching you work,” Eliot says with a shrug and not a trace of apology in his voice.

Quentin grins, closing the distance between them for a quick kiss. “I’m not doing anything that interesting.” “It’s not about what you’re doing,” Eliot says. “Or it is, but — I don’t know, you’re doing this like next-level magic and you’re concentrating really hard, all focused or whatever, it’s —” He shrugs like a man resigned to his fate. “Frankly kind of hot, if you must know.”

A pleased flush travels down the back of his neck. Out loud he says, “God, you’re so whipped.”

“It’s embarrassing,” Eliot says agreeably.

“Speaking of,” Quentin says, “I have a surprise for you.”

Eliot raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “I mean, it’s not, like, a material thing — or a sex thing, so, get your mind away from that right now — actually it’s objectively kind of a crappy surprise, like, on the merits. But I think you’re going to like it anyway.”

“You’re really selling this,” Eliot murmurs, amused.

“I know, right?” Quentin says, fishing in his pocket. “Here, let’s actually just — sit down —”

They settle onto the grass and Quentin runs the tuts to shake his secondhand guitar back to full size while Eliot watches with open-hearted curiosity. Quentin can’t believe he gets to have someone look at him like that for the rest of his life. “So as you know, I’m a terrible singer — like, totally tone-deaf, just no talent at all — and to tell you the truth, I basically suck at the guitar, too,” Quentin says, “although Hannah says I’m getting better, but — I don’t know, I was thinking about it and it’s like, life isn’t about the ending, right? It’s not about proving anything, or — it’s about the process. I’m trying to really, like, believe that or whatever, and I just feel — really lucky, El, that I get to have you around for mine. That I get to share it with you, kind of, even the parts that are rough and, and off-key, and that I’m maybe never going to be actually good at — so. This is kind of, like, a metaphor for that, or whatever.”

“Now who’s whipped,” Eliot says, while his eyes say _I love you_.

“So whipped,” Quentin says, “wait till you hear the song I picked.” And then he runs the tuning spell Jenny taught him, just in case, and sitting on the grass by the garden of broken objects he starts strumming so that he can badly sing: _When the sun shines, we’ll shine together — told you I’ll be here forever — said I’ll always be your friend…_

He doesn’t make Eliot listen to him massacre the entire song; two choruses and one verse seems like more than enough to get the point across. When he finishes, setting the guitar to the side, Eliot’s staring at him misty-eyed, which he wasn’t expecting but probably should have. Smiling he says, “That bad, huh?”

Eliot rolls his eyes, wipes at their corners. “Shut up, you know that’s not — I’m just — I don’t know.” He bites his lip, that face he gets when he’s about to make himself be a little bit brave. Quentin waits patiently. “Sometimes I just can’t believe how good it is, you know?”

He doesn’t say what _it_ is, but — Quentin does know. “Yeah.”

“I thought you were gone,” Eliot says. “And then I thought you were, I don’t know. Something else. And then you weren’t that, and I thought I’d used up all my luck. Every chip I’d had cashed in, to be your friend again. And now you’re here, and we’re — us —”

“Dating,” Quentin supplies, to watch Eliot’s eyelashes flutter at the word. “Boyfriends. Functionally engaged.”

“ — together,” Eliot says, soft. “And what I can’t stop thinking about is that on top of that — on top of every reason this shouldn’t have happened, on top of every place I should have fucked it up for good — all that good shit, and somehow after fifty years you’re still surprising me.”

Quentin leans over to kiss him, tenderly on the lips, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do with that? He loves Eliot, he loves them, he loves this thing they’re building together, piece by unexpected piece, following only the map of their hearts. Eliot cradles his neck as he kisses him back, the familiar warmth of his sturdy hands. Quentin likes it so much, every single time.

When they part Eliot is teary again. Laughing as he brings the back of his hand to his cheek, he says, “Also one of my recent revelations in therapy is that I thought working on my shit would make me mellow out, and in some ways it has, but now I cry at the drop of a hat. Like, I cried at a Gerber commercial last week. You might be dating kind of a crybaby, actually.”

“Yeah, babe,” Quentin says warmly, heart so full his chest could burst, “I don’t know how to break it to you, but that one’s not a surprise.”

*

At a safehouse in Atlanta Quentin and Penny help a crew of hedges establish a portal so their resident Traveler can stop bleeding himself faint every time they need to collaborate with their sister coven down in Durham. The hedge in question, a tall and wiry Black guy around their age, maybe a little younger, thanks them profusely as they run through maintenance, upkeep, and how to re-do the dimensional opening if for any reason it needs to close, which Quentin feels awkward about. There’s a thin silver scar on his arm that makes Quentin wince to look at. It’s not the same, he knows, as the one on his thigh, but he thinks of it anyway. Of the things you carry forever, because you didn’t know how to do it better when you were young.

At least they’re here now. All three of them.

Afterwards he and Penny follow a tip to hit up a local barbecue spot and over ribs Quentin says, “It’s so fucked up, that this is even necessary. Portals aren’t fucking hard. Any Brakebills first-year can manage one. Working collaboratively, just about anyone who’s ever worked a spell should be able to get it right, if they know what to do. If magicians weren’t so fucking uptight, that guy wouldn’t need to have spent years literally cutting himself open just to work some basic transport magic.”

“Man, don’t get me started,” says Penny. “Travelers get so fucked over, in and out of the academy. When we were at Brakebills Sunderland used to get up my ass about — your gift will take everything from you, you’ll never have a home, blah blah bullshit.” He takes a sip of his beer. “Like what the fuck was I supposed to do with that, huh? How was any of that supposed to help me?”

“Jesus,” Quentin says. “And I thought my interview sucked.”

“I’m sure it did,” says Penny. “That place is fucked.”

“I watch Hannah practicing basic shit,” says Quentin, “like, foundational locomotion stuff, or whatever, and she’s working hard, but she’s having fun, too, and it’s just like — it never had to be like that. I spent two years butting heads with Fogg over whether magic was like, inherently toxic, and god, if anyone would have the right to say it is it’s gotta be me, right?” He shakes his head. “But it’s not.”

“No,” Penny says. “Magic’s not, and same with fucking Traveling, man. Like, Hannah’s gonna be fine. A couple more months and she’ll have a free express ticket to anywhere in the goddamn cosmos. Why the fuck should she have to be afraid of that? Of who she is?”

Quentin smiles at him. “She likes you a lot, you know. She thinks you’re like, cool.”

Penny grins. “I am cool.”

“I got points for knowing who Sleater-Kinney was,” Quentin says. “But mostly I’m pretty sure she thinks of me as like, a huge dork. Which, I mean. She has a point.”

“Yeah, but that’s kind of good, right?” says Penny. “I mean, on some level, you don’t want the guy who drives you to school to be cool. You want him to be, like, reliable and shit. I assume.”

Quentin thinks with a hard sweet pang about his father: Tambourine Man in the car, fastidiously obeying every traffic law. Asking every day how school was, undeterred by Quentin’s perennial sullen _Fine, I guess_. “Are you telling me I have dad vibes?”

Penny holds his palms up. “You said it, not me. But —” He shrugs. “Are you telling me you don’t?”

“Maybe I do,” Quentin says. It’s getting harder to argue with, and he doesn’t really mind the concept. He’s not afraid of who he is anymore, either.

*

“It seems as though things are going well for you,” says Jane.

Quentin studies the black and white design growing on board. They’ve switched to Go, which Jane’s good at but he has at least a fighting chance to win. “I think so, actually. It’s funny, like — nothing’s really changed. I mean, that’s not true — I’m dating Eliot, and I think I’ve got the knife right this time, and I don’t know _what_ the fuck is going on at that place that used be haunted but it’s really cool, but — I don’t know. Things were good before, you know? The first time I came by. If someone had shown my past self that life, he would have been — thrilled, if he could even believe it. But it feels different, now. It feels — mine, I guess.” He puts a black stone down, frowning at his choice, noticing as he second-guesses himself that the white-noise buzz of the cottage hasn’t faded yet.

“That pleases me,” Jane murmurs. “I hope you don’t mind, but — I’m somewhat invested in you. In your — not success, exactly. But the rest of it, so to speak.”

Quentin thinks about Hannah, who he’s known less than two months and would already do just about anything for. And he didn’t even watch her die thirty-nine times. “I get that, I think. I — appreciate it.”

She smiles, makes her move. “I’ve been enjoying the book you brought me,” she says. “It’s funny. I don’t get many laughs these days.”

“Yeah, she’s great,” Quentin says. He’d gone after much deliberation with _On Beauty_ , which he hadn’t read since he was a teenager but which he remembered as being wry and long and very British, and charming without being whimsical, all of which seemed like they might be benefits to Jane Chatwin in Fillory. “I can bring you more of her stuff, if you want.” He places a stone down, picks up the white piece he’s captured. 

“I’d like that,” Jane says. “And if it’s not too much trouble, perhaps a nice biography — I used to enjoy those very much, before my own life got too interesting to keep up the habit.”

“No trouble,” Quentin says. He lets his eyes wander to the bookshelf in the cottage’s corner, _On Beauty’s_ thick red spine glaringly modern among the well-worn spellbooks and a familiar set of hardcovers. “I can’t believe you still have those books,” Quentin says.

Jane follows his gaze curiously. “Oh — _Fillory and Further_ , I assume? Unless you have unusually strong opinions about Lamarck’s Herbal.”

“It’s bad enough you have to stay here, in this place that —” Quentin doesn’t know how to finish this sentence. The place that made your brother, the place that killed your brother. He’s never apologized to her for his part in that. He doesn’t think she wants him to — it’s what she used him for — and he’s not sorry, exactly, but he’ll never forget, either, the terrified little boy at the dark estate. “But, I don’t know, if it were me in those books, knowing what you know, I feel like I’d want to burn them.” It’s not him in those books — well, mostly not — and he still kind of wants to burn them.

“Americans are so given to dramatics,” she says, somewhere between thoughtful and teasing.

Quentin scoffs in disbelief. “If being turned into a bestseller by the monster that ruined your life and then lied about it in millions of copies printed doesn’t entitle you to being a little dramatic, what the fuck does?”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at,” says Jane. “I never did think of it as lying, though.”

“I mean,” Quentin says, “it’s obviously not _true_. You know that better than anyone.”

“Well,” she says, “he _was_ writing for children.”

Quentin stares. “Seriously? If anything that just makes it more fucked up.”

“His conduct was abominable,” she says, “obviously I’m not disagreeing there. But for better or worse, who I am in those pages is a part of who I became. Not the whole of me, not even close — but enough that I can’t just toss it in the bin like scrap paper. And that’s true whether or not they’re on my shelf. The Fillory books are — they’re just stories. Of course they’re false. All stories are. But all good stories say something true, too. And as much as I might hate to admit it, _Fillory and Further_ is a good story.”

“Come on,” he protests, “you can’t mean that. Like every word in those books is total bullshit.”

“Is it?” She lifts her eyebrows mirthfully. “Is Julia not a witch? Are you not a fool?”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

“I do know,” she says. “And I’m trying to explain what I mean. A story is like a spell, Quentin. It’s something someone makes; it’s something you can use. Something that captures a slice of something real to create something new. You don’t become a magician by searching for the one perfect spell that brings all of magic to its knees for you. You gather up spells that become yours, and you put them to uses that serve your ends, and it’s that process that makes you the magician you are. What you learn, and what you do with it. It takes discipline, but it takes curiosity, too. And it never stops. If you don’t know a spell that does what you need, you learn a new spell. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the spells that exist —” She stands to retrieve something from the shelf and hands it to him.

Quentin studies the volume in his hand: a manuscript, loosely bound, titled in fading ink and flowing script. _Fillory and Further Book VI: The Magicians_. In smaller handwriting in the bottom left corner is the name: _Jane Chatwin_. “You write your own.”

She smiles at him. “The linear version of me left a copy here, for safe-keeping. I found it useful, to get my own story straight. I suppose that’s as much an explanation as I can give you — the other books no longer hold any power over me, because I know they’re not my only story. I proved that to myself.”

Quentin opens the yellowed pages gingerly, curious in spite of himself. He doesn’t really want another fucking Fillory book at this point, but — he does kind of wonder, what it looks like through Jane’s eyes.

“You can take it, if you’d like,” she said. With a twinkle in her eye she adds, “Although I should warn you — in the timelines where I did manage to get it into your hands, you didn’t much care for it.”

Quentin shuts the book softly, moved by her offer. “You gave it to those Quentins when they were at Brakebills, right?” he says. She nods. “Yeah, those guys kind of sucked. I have a hunch I’ll feel differently, now.”

Jane puts a white stone on the board, looking warmly amused. “I thought you might.”

*

“So Luisa’s friend in government came through,” Quentin says. “I don’t know what strings he pulled, but the lot won’t be built over anytime soon. And apparently he’s working on getting it to legally stay in our custody permanently.”

“That’s great,” Julia says.

“Is it?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

They hit an incline and he pauses to breathe through it until the elevation levels out again. It’s the first warm weekend in New York, the kind of day where everyone on the subway seems a little friendlier for having shed their winter layers and the sidewalks are freshly populated with pedestrians eager to bare their limbs to the sunlight for the first time in months, and Julia had suggested that once he wrapped up in Fillory they take advantage of the weather and the season by going for a run in Central Park. Quentin had instinctively balked at the idea, and then realized — it’s Saturday. He would have run six miles today anyway. Why not do them with her?

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s not really _ours_. It’s still evolving. The Naturalists have their corner, and some psychics have some weird shit going around the fence, and people come in and out all the time to do spells or just to hang out, and that’s — good, right? That’s what we want. If we’re excited about it because it’s opening magic up, like — we don’t want to turn around and close it. And obviously I don’t think we’re going to, but — it feels weird. I don’t want someone we don’t trust to — take it over, somehow. But who says we get to be the ones that make that decision?”

“I get that,” Julia says. “Hey, let’s turn here.” Quentin follows her swerving left as they pass a lawn still winter-brown. “But it doesn’t have to be a decision you make once, right? You can figure it out as you go. Talk to people, see what feels right. If things get fucked up, change it.”

It sounds so simple when she says it like that. And it’s not, but — maybe it kind of is, too. They jog under a budding canopy of pink, moving not in tandem but in the same way: one foot in front of the other. Left, then right. “I guess you’re right.”

“And if it can be used to — bring people to magic, who might not have found it otherwise, might not have even had it otherwise,” Julia says, “I mean, that could be huge.”

He still feels kind of dizzy when he thinks about it. “We don’t know if I’m right about that yet,” he says. “We’ll need to see if this thing with the queen pays off.”

He’s facing forward, but he can tell in the pause that Julia’s rolling her eyes. “You don’t really think you might be wrong.”

“I don’t,” he admits. “But that stuff, too, like — it sounds really fucking cool to say that magic is for everyone, but if you follow that through to its logical conclusion, like, what the fuck does that even look like? It’s not new that terrible people can do magic too, but — is it worse when it’s anyone? What does that mean for like, the world? And I know that if I am right, it’ll be — god, years, decades maybe before it spreads in a way that really — tips any kind of balance, it might not even be in our lifetimes, but — I can’t even picture what that looks like, or what it should. A lot could go — bad.”

“A lot can always go bad,” Julia says. “But now good things are possible that we didn’t think were possible before. I mean, shit — I might be able to tell my sister about it.”

Quentin looks at her, startled. “Is that something you want?”

Julia laughs. “I don’t know. We’ve never exactly been close, but — she’s the only person I’m related to that I still talk to at all. I guess as I get older that feels worth more than it did. It might be nice.”

Quentin thinks about Hannah, and Edward, and Beth, finishing her degree upstate. “Shit. I hadn’t thought about that, I guess. I guess I’d thought about it — I don’t know, abstractly, but — not in terms of what it could actually mean for people.” He feels some of his worry dissipate, making space for excitement. “That’s pretty cool.”

She laughs again. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool that you found a way to like, change all of magic. No biggie.”

“I didn’t, exactly,” says Quentin. “I mean it was Rishi’s project, and the haunting was there before us, and if Luisa hadn’t started doing spellshares I never would have thought to try collaboration on that scale, which she wouldn’t have done if _you_ hadn’t invited us to that one in Portland…” And, and, and. The luck of it boggles his brain.

“But it was your idea,” Julia says.

They pass a bank of white blossoming trees, flowers with a soft pink tinge blooming explosively against the dark branches still bare of leaves. It’s two years since he left New York, Quentin realizes; he doesn’t know the exact day, but he remembers it was April. The city coming back to life, waking up in color and sweetness he couldn’t turn his face to the sun long enough to see. It feels like so much longer. “When I let the city,” he says, “I wasn’t thinking about — changing magic, or doing anything. I wasn’t thinking about — anything, really, except — I don’t know.” Leaving, escaping, another secret door. Dying or else not dying, like by fleeing Manhattan he flipped a coin and he’s still not sure which side he was hoping to see when it landed. “I was just trying to get through — the next five minutes, if that. So — I don’t know if I deserve the credit.”

“You showed up,” Julia says. “And you kept showing up. For a lot more than five minutes. There are a lot of places you could have given up, along the line.”

It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like everywhere he could have given up, he did, and everywhere he didn’t, he didn’t have a choice. But maybe there’s always a choice. To put one more foot in front of the other, or to stop. “Maybe.”

They hit another incline and jog in peaceful silence for a while. Their pace is easier for her than it is for him, even with his several added inches of height, but this is still farther and faster than he thought he’d be able to go until he did. “I remember when you told me I should go slow enough to carry a conversation,” he says when he can speak again, “I thought you were fucking nuts.”

“And yet here we are,” Julia says, “conversing.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She’s smug as hell, but Quentin figures she’s earned it. “What’s your secret for not getting the first mile to suck ass, though? I can run a fucking 10K without wanting to plunge into a volcano but every time I start out it still feels like torture.”

Julia laughs. Quentin admires the cardiovascular ability it takes to do so at the moment. “There’s no secret. It just sucks, and you run it out till it doesn’t.”

“Wait,” he says, “what?”

“Warming up helps, obviously,” she says, “and keeping up a foam rolling habit, stretching enough, all that good shit. But the first mile always sucks. Maybe not for elite marathon champions, but for everyone else. Definitely for me.”

“Huh,” Quentin says. 

“Yeah,” she says, a comfortably familiar teasing lilt in her voice, “you’re not special, Q.”

“Thank god,” Quentin says, and they keep moving through the park.

*

“I’m going to run the tut sequence a couple times,” Quentin explains, “to kind of — make sure that the magic settles into where it’s supposed to be. It should mostly work fine with just me casting, but I want to loop you in at the very end — it can get a little volatile, and I think if it sees where it’s going, that’ll help round it out without undoing or fucking up the progress it’s made. Nothing fancy, just — like we did when we were planting it, just connecting it. And maybe —” He hesitates, looking for the word. “Maybe just try to — welcome it, as weird if that sounds. Just — you know, think about how — you’re glad to see it, or whatever. If you can. If not — don’t worry about it.”

Xanthis nods at him. Her gaze is as impassive as ever, but there’s less imperiousness in her demeanor with him today. Behind her, the guards of the Fingerlings watch the scene with undisguised curiosity, while Margo and Eliot look on like — Quentin kind of hates that this is the image that comes to mind — parents at their kid’s first school play, anxious and proud. “Very well, magician. Shall we begin?”

Quentin tries not to react to that unexpected _we_. “Yeah, let’s do it.”

The tuts he’s using are mostly the standard security moves he’d learned from Josh, same architecture as the sequence he’d dug up the compass with but juiced up to try to match the knife’s ferocity. He runs it once to stir the ambient, twice to hook into the knife proper, a third time slower so he can read what he’s coming back to. They’re not quite done, but he can’t quite keep the smile off his face as he brings the knife’s magic into his stream, because — it’s there, he fucking knows it. That clear bright shine of rightness, the sturdy connection that tells him it’s complete. Its power strong and wild, still, not exactly tamed, but no longer fighting, either. The power of something that knows it’s whole. It’s there and it feels fucking good and for a moment he can’t resist just holding it there, drinking in the satisfaction of a job well fucking done, marveling at everything it took to get here: Alice’s help and Josh’s suggestions, Rishi’s exorcism and Hannah’s boyfriend, ceramic plates and a compass made of bone, the magic that changed him and the people who saved him and the days when all he did was not quite die. The ghosts and the garden, the power in transformation and the space to grow. The mix of effort and luck, chance and choice, terror and miracle. Beauty of all fucking life. Quentin almost laughs because — it’s all random. It’s all so fucking random that he wouldn’t even be here without Kady’s book and Jane Chatwin’s advice, Julia’s care and Penny’s truth, Luisa’s grace and Eliot’s love, the son he never had and the selkie who pulled him out from the waves — a shapeless story that didn’t matter except for being his, a life pulled the fuck together in steps and spells and songs, a thousand moments that weren’t anything until he stuck around long enough to decide what they meant.

Focus, Coldwater, he reminds himself; almost there. “Okay,” he says, lifting his face to catch Xanthis’s eyes, “if you can remember what you did last time, to hook in —”

To his surprise, she lifts her hands as if on instinct and activates her magic immediately. A second later he can feel her stream pushing its way to his channel, tentative and uncontrolled but easier by far than it had been two weeks ago.

“Nice,” he says without thinking. The queen permits herself a small smile. “Now remember what I said about — letting it in — all of it, even the pieces that seem kind of fucked up still, because — it can’t work if it’s not whole —”

And the magic starts to shift, like water calming after a storm. Like the bloody hues of sunrise easing into a soft golden day. Quentin runs a final, probably redundant closing, just to be safe. Then, heart pounding, he starts to dig.

The knife is definitely a knife; that’s a relief. Quentin unsheaths it from its bronze scabbard to reveal a sharp, clean blade, glinting under the sun, and an ornately patterned hilt, braided metal studded with gemstones the same soft gray color as Xanthis’s pale eyes. And it has power; he can feel that the second it’s in his hands. Deep power, the kind Quentin associates with his dealings with gods and creatures close to that ilk. More than enough, he suspects, to power an island nation through the shortages, in the right hands. Which — “Here,” he says, holding the knife out, “it feels good to me, but — you’re the one who’ll be wielding it, so —”

Xanthis takes the blade. He wonders if he needs to help her — make it hers, or figure out how to use it, or — but the second her hand closes around the hilt, she closes her eyes in an expression of unmistakable peace, breathing in deeply like she’s inhaling some sweet aroma half-remembered from long ago. When she opens her eyes she says simply, “Yes.” There’s an ocean of feeling in the word.

“Yes?” says Margo. “We’re good here? Knife mended, war permanently cancelled? Peace on Fillory, goodwill towards humans of all genders?”

“Yes,” the queen says again, brisk this time as she gets to her feet. Quentin follows her example. “A great day for my people, and for our nations. High King Margo, it is customary in our tradition to cement an alliance through a celebration, jointly held. Does this align with the conventions at Whitespire?”

“Oh, we love a party,” says Margo.

“It’s kind of our specialty,” says Eliot.

“You call off the dogs,” says Margo, “we’ll throw you more parties than a trust fund DJ whose parents bought him a warehouse in Williamsburg.”

Xanthis frowns. “We have no dogs on our islands.”

“Earth expression,” Eliot says, “don’t worry about it. Can we interest the delegation in a celebratory drink as we begin our peace talks? I’m getting this total brainwave about the centerpiece situation.”

Xanthis glances at her guards. “You all may begin. I request a moment alone with the magician, to express my gratitude privately.”

Margo asks Quentin a silent question with her eyes, and he shrugs, nods. He doesn’t know what Xanthis’s private gratitude looks like, but he’s not worried. “Come find us in the Great Hall when you’re ready to talk cocktail options.”

Xanthis watches them walk into the castle. Once they’re gone, she turns to Quentin and her face looks — different. Less regal, more open, somehow. “Magician,” she says, in an agitated whisper, “I have been waiting — I tried to — look, I —”

Quentin has no idea what she’s talking about. But then she presses her hands together, wrist to wrist, fingers curving outwards like winter branches, and frowns at her palms, arms trembling slightly, until —

— sparks, golden and smooth as the metal of her armor, shake out of her fingertips. Just a lightning-flash second of them, sparks and nothing more, but — magic, happening in her hands.

She looks back up at him, almost shy. “Do you see? I —”

“Hey,” Quentin says, a slow smile spreading across his face, “did you figure that out yourself? That’s pretty good.”

Xanthis nods, biting her lip. “It was difficult. It took me many nights. Many hours of effort. I —” She breaks off uncertainly.

“Yeah, magic’s hard,” he tells her. “But that’s a great start. Especially for working on your own. It’s easier when you have people to learn from.”

“Magician,” she says hesitantly. “Can I — do you think you — would I be able to — can you teach me?” 

“Oh,” Quentin says, surprised and pleased. “Yeah, I can teach you — uh, I have to figure out my schedule, I kind of have a lot going on, but — I can teach you. Or, one of my friends can, too. We’ll figure something out, though, for sure. Margo will probably let you know the details. That’s cool, though, that you kept working at it — it’s fun, right? Even though it’s hard?”

“It is — fun,” Xanthis says, the word sounding alien in her mouth. “Thank you, magician.” A smile spreads across her face and for a moment she doesn’t look like a queen; she’s just a magician, like him. For the first time he notices that she’s not that much older than he is — they might even be the same age.

“Yeah, of course,” he says. “You know, if we’re going to keep — working together, or whatever, you can just call me Quentin. If you’re, like, comfortable with that, or whatever.”

The queen regards him for a moment, then makes a decisive nod. “Quentin. And —” She hesitates; looks with wonder down at her hands. “In private conversations, where the bounds of propriety may be loosened — you may call me Xanthis. If you are —” She says next part like an actor speaking a foreign language phonetically. “Like comfortable with that or whatever.”

“Xanthis,” Quentin says, grinning. “Sure, okay.”

*

They hold a quasi-ceremonial dinner to commemorate the occasion and the renewed partnership between the nations, Xanthis and Margo giving speeches that manage to convey sincere gratitude while sounding like elaborate ways of saying _I am so glad I don’t have to deal with you anymore_. Quentin sits next to Eliot, enduring a toast to his own skills and trying to foist the attention over to Josh, who’s happy enough to shift conversation over to the menu’s ingenuities. He feels like it hasn’t quite hit him — that he fixed the knife, which means Xanthis fixed the knife, which means he was fucking right and magic is bigger than any of them ever knew. It’s too big to look at, terrifying and miraculous. The tectonic plates of their world shifting dramatically, because — because of a ton of shit, actions and desires weaving together like strands of ambient making a spell, but also because he wanted to fix something, and he did.

After dinner and a final round of toasts, considerably less eloquent than the first, Josh departs with the delegation heading back to the Fingerlings to start collaborating with their royal chef on feast plans, and Quentin follows Eliot and Margo to the royal chambers. In her room Margo drops her crown, untucks the knot of her hair, and sheds her shawl, transforming in a second from High King to Quentin’s friend. “ _Fuck_ yes, Q,” she exults, grinning like a Welters champion, “you just dropped the temperature on my ass ten degrees fucking Celsius.” She throws her arms around him tight and says by his ear, more emotional than he would have expected, “I knew if anyone could figure it out, it’d be you.”

“Margo — thank you,” he says, throat tight, meaning — for trusting him with her kingdom, for believing in his magic, for giving him a chance to do better in the places he’d failed.

She lets him go and whirls immediately to wrap herself around Eliot’s waist. Quentin smiles; it’s nice, seeing Margo so enthused. “God,” she says against his chest, “we’ve been needing a fucking win, haven’t we?”

“We certainly have, Bambi,” he murmurs, stroking her hair.

“And not — remember, it doesn’t stop here,” Quentin says. He’s not drunk, but he almost feels it, cells buzzing with possibility. “Xanthis asked me to — to train her, basically, to help her learn magic, and — and I think we _can_ , and not just her, I mean — if you want to, to recruit people, or start with people you trust — Rafe, maybe — I don’t know how many people you need, for the shortages not to be an issue, but — but we can make it happen.” They can do anything, he thinks, stomach jumping. The future open and waiting for them to decide what it’ll be.

“Jesus,” Margo whispers, then laughs. “Jesus tits-out Christ on a sashimi platter, is this what good news feels like? I feel like I’m on fucking molly.” She tilts her head up and stands on tip-toes to plant a kiss on Eliot’s mouth, laughing again as she breaks off. “Sorry, forgot that present company might find that awkward.”

“Hey, don’t stop on my account,” Quentin says, holding his hands up in a gesture of innocence. It is, like, a _little_ awkward, but mostly just because he feels like a fifth wheel, and maybe just a tad like a voyeur. He meant it, when he said this was — part of Eliot’s world, a room in his heart Quentin had no interest in disturbing. “I can leave, if you guys want to, uh — you know. Celebrate your royal victory in — in private.” Eliot purses his lips a little at this, but he keeps his gaze on Margo, deferring to her will.

Margo narrows her eyes. “Not much of a celebration without the real victor there, is it? And not just because tall, dark, and grossly embarrassing over here would miss you terribly if you departed early.”

“I didn’t say that,” Eliot protests, but his heart’s not in it.

“But you’re not wrong,” Margo says, a sharp smile edging across her face, “about how I like to mark a special occasion.”

A rush of heat crosses Quentin’s stomach, half sudden nerves, half — something else. “Are you,” he tries, “I mean — I don’t want to presume, here —”

“I’ll simplify for you,” she says, with a familiar friendly condescension. “Do you want to fuck us?”

Quentin’s brain shorts out a little, at that. When he’s capable of thought again his first impulse is — he and Eliot haven’t talked about this. Like, they’ve talked about Eliot and Margo, and about like, future configurations of boundaries in the abstract, and maybe Margo and Eliot have talked about Quentin, but — but they should talk about it, like, the two of them, before they have a threesome with Eliot’s best friend, right? That’s like, the boyfriends thing to do?

His second impulse is — yeah, he wants to fuck them. _Obviously_. He wants to fuck Eliot basically always, and Margo is so hot she looks made up, and more than either of those things he really wants to fuck _them_ — he wants to be allowed into the duo of Eliot and Margo, to belong for a night to the closest thing Eliot has, Quentin’s pretty sure, to something sacred. To tangle up their wanting in new shapes.

Quentin says, “El?”

El’s reply is comfortingly swift. “There is literally no version of this evening that I don’t love. Including the one where we all keep our clothes on because you and Margo got distracted by talking about boring nerd shit.” Margo makes a face and steps on his toe.

“Then —” Quentin stares at them in their impossible paired beauty, kind of dizzy to contemplate being invited in, shocked at how fucking good it feels to want it — to want Eliot, and Margo too, and the three of them together, so much more than he should have the right to ask for, but — fuck it. He can do anything. “Yeah, I’m in.”

Eliot and Margo smile at him in only slightly creepy tandem, respectively fond and pleased. “So stop staring like a wallflower virgin at prom,” says Margo, “and get your ass over here.”

Quentin closes the distance between them until they’re standing in an odd triangle. He’s unsure in a way he would have found excruciating years ago, pulse quickening, wondering what the rules are and what happens if he does something wrong. He doesn’t mind it now, he realizes. They get to make the rules together. Whatever happens, he knows it’s going to be good.

He says, “I don’t know, I feel like Eliot would be super into the virgin at prom thing. Maybe you guys should hash that out first.”

Margo gives a delighted laugh. “Oh, you’re going to be _fun_ ,” she says, clapping her hands together like before she was curious but now she’s intrigued. Quentin feels weirdly proud, and kind of turned on about it, so — this is starting off normal, basically.

“I _told_ you,” Eliot says, in a voice that sounds like it’s just for her, “I wouldn’t stick around for someone who was boring in bed.” Quentin is endeared by this, and not just because he’s not a hundred percent convinced it’s true. Eliot is adventurous, but he’s also pretty easy to please.

“And yet you wouldn’t give me _any_ of the details to prove it,” Margo says. To Quentin she says, “That’s how I knew he had it bad. Usually he tells me _everything_. But I guess at least now I get to find out what I’m working with firsthand.” And then she moves in and kisses Quentin’s mouth.

It’s weird, kissing someone who isn’t Eliot. Which is funny, because he was doing that regularly not that far back, but — he wasn’t expecting this ten minutes ago. Margo kisses him expertly, almost playfully, a kiss that’s less about hunger and more about taste — like a sommelier exploring a novel vintage. It’s a little intimidating, which is kind of hot. Margo brings firm fingers to his jaw at the same moment Eliot brings gentle hands to his waist and soft lips pressed unmoving to the back of his neck, and wow, okay, that combination of demand and sweetness is — his body is taking notice.

Margo breaks the kiss but doesn’t let go, holding his face in place as if for examination while Eliot keeps nuzzling at the crook of his neck. Quentin swallows. “This isn’t a look but don’t touch situation.” She smirks. “Unless you’re into that.”

His dick twitches while Eliot huffs a laugh against his skin. “I’m not — opposed,” he manages, sounding he thinks only like forty percent as far gone as he already is. Margo raises an eyebrow, curious and maybe a little impressed, which — _Jesus_ , these two. “But if you want me to — touch you —” And that’s weird too, because like, it’s _Margo_ , what are the two of them actually doing, it’s one thing to be like _let’s all fuck_ but does she actually want to — feel his hands on her? Like, not as a bit?

But apparently she does, because she says, “Yeah, Coldwater. Let’s see what you’ve got.” She drops her hand to her side then, cocking her head expectantly with a glint in her eye like she’s got his fucking number, which, like, she probably does. She’s very sexually experienced and Quentin’s not being subtle.

Hands, right. He has those. He brings them to — her face, to start. Cradling it as he lets it sink in that this is actually happening between them. She wants to have sex with him, she’s gonna have to put up with some gazing.

“Unconventional choice,” she says.

“I’m a fucking gentleman,” he says, and kisses her like he fucking means it.

She receives him a little more eagerly this time, and he doesn’t know if she’s getting into it or if she’s playing along or even what the difference is for someone like Margo, but he appreciates it either way. Starts letting his hands move down her body, so much smaller than his but vibrating with an inarguable power even as she lets him spread his palm along the curve of her lower back. Eliot backs up to let her loop her arms around Quentin’s shoulders — are they, like, psychic? Did she give him a code? — but as he does so he murmurs, “That’s right. There you go,” and Quentin presses his body forward on instinct, caught by the disconnect between Eliot’s voice and Margo’s body waiting where she can definitely feel the start of his erection through his jeans. He slips his other hand down Margo’s waist and back up, resting just at the side of her breast as she kisses him like she’s starting to think he has something she wants.

“You really are polite,” she says, half-mocking.

There are a couple ways he could take that. Quentin goes with, “I like to do things right,” which — could mean a lot of things.

“Yeah,” she says, thoughtful. “I just bet you do.” Without warning she makes a tight fist in his hair and pulls, right up by the scalp, and he sags forward with a groan. “That was easier than I thought. I kinda thought I’d have to work a little harder to get you to relax.”

“I’m so easy for it,” he says before can stop himself. “It’s pretty fucking humiliating, actually.”

Margo’s eyes widen slightly, like she’s recalibrating something; Quentin likes that. A lot. “I can’t say I’m surprised,” she says, looking him over consideringly. “I mean, you’re pretty fucking obvious.” Quuentin inhales sharply. “El and I used to speculate, way back when — that one cute-ish first-year, the really neurotic one? God, I bet he likes some _nasty_ shit.”

“You think so, Bambi?” Eliot says, playing the part of his past self.

Margo scoffs, eyes never leaving Quentin’s. “Please. Someone that tightly wound? It’s gotta get fucked up when he jerks off. Coming all over himself thinking about how bad he wants someone to tear him apart. Make him beg for it. Make it hurt. Tell him _exactly_ what he is — pathetic, greedy, desperate little fuck-up.”

That cold _what_ lands like a bomb in Quentin’s stomach. “Oh, fuck — Margo…” He can hear his own voice fluttering in a way it mostly doesn’t, anymore, and he likes that, too, his old nervousness spreading across him like a costume that still fits.

“I’m a goddamn king, you impudent little cretin,” she hisses. “Keep my name out of your _fucking_ mouth. Understood?” She yanks at his hair to punctuate the question.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck _fuck_ — “Yes, sir.”

The word falls out of his fucking mouth without the slightest intention, and as soon as it’s in the air his face burns humiliated-hot because _what the fuck is your damage?_ Genuine surprise takes over Margo’s face for a second and he wonders if he’s like, for-real fucked this up. But then her lips curl into an appreciative smile, which makes sense, because — Quentin tries to keep breathing as it sinks in, the thrill of it and how fucking stupid it is and the thrill of that too — like, he is fucking a goddamn king.

“Better,” she says. “Now get on your knees.”

Quentin just about topples to the floor, mouth hanging open. Margo keeps hold of him by the hair the whole time, which — _fuck_.

“God, look at you,” she sneers. “You’ve been waiting your whole life for a bitch like me to take control, haven’t you?”

He nods, not without effort. “Yes — sir.” The slight wrongness of the word burns sharp and right in his mouth.

“Fucking disgusting,” she says. Quentin moans. “I’d ask if you liked it as much as you’d hoped, but I don’t need to, do I?” She — oh _fuck_ — brings the toe of one high-heeled shoe to his crotch, running it up and down against the bulge of his raging hard-on. Quentin makes a series of humiliating high-pitched sounds. Margo laughs, meanly. “So fucking obvious. Jesus, El, are you seeing this?”

“With eyes wide open,” Eliot says, voice rough, and Jesus Christ, Quentin can’t see him but just the thought of what Eliot is watching — the idea that Eliot is seeing Quentin degraded and undone and loving every second — he feels like a live-wire, and no one’s even undressed yet.

“You must be good for something, though,” Margo says. “Even if it’s just a hole to fuck into.”

“My mouth,” Quentin blurts out, carried away by arousal, before his pulse speeds up as he realizes what he’s done. “Shit, sorry — I’m sorry, your highness — I fucked up, I always fuck up, I know I don’t have the right to speak —” He has to fight to keep his hips still, saying all that, what is _wrong_ with him.

“Damn right you don’t,” Margo says. “I’ll let that one slide, though. I have a soft spot for a boy who knows his place.”

That condescending _boy_ — fuck, Margo’s _good_ at this. “Uh — permission to speak, sir?” It’s crazy how much he loves asking for that.

“Permission granted,” she says. “But make it quick.”

“I’m — I’m good with my mouth,” he says, “I — can I, can I — service you, with my mouth, let me — prove it, it’s like the one thing — you’re right, your majesty, I’m pathetic, I’m a fucking waste of space, but if you’d just let me —”

“Shut the fuck up.” Quentin clamps his mouth shut. “An interesting proposition. But I want to see some proof, first. El?”

Margo shifts so that she’s standing behind him, hand still wound in his hair as if in warning not to move, while Eliot, blessedly, steps forward so that Quentin is eye-level with his perfect goddamn cock — already hard, already out in his hand, red and huge. Quentin feels his own dick jump to think that all this time Eliot’s been loving what it looks like for Quentin to get what he wants. “Reporting for duty,” Eliot says, languid and fond, somehow both the debauched aristocrat ready to use Quentin’s willing mouth and the affectionate boyfriend stepping back into something familiar and warm. He presses the soft skin of his dick against Quentin’s half-parted lips, but Quentin — Quentin’s going to do this right. He’s going to wait until the king says go.

“Let’s see,” Margo says, “what that famous mouth of yours is good for.”

Quentin opens wide.

He closes his mouth automatically as Eliot slides in, falling into the well-worn bliss of his very favorite cock in the whole wide world filling up his mouth. Eliot lets out a whispered “Fuck, Q,” and Quentin feels himself melting at the gratitude in it. Quentin starts to move up and down along the insane length of his ridiculous dick, loving the comfort of the motion and the new frisson of knowing Margo’s watching, knowing he’s performing, knowing he’s on display — and let her watch, he thinks wildly. Let her see what he can fucking do.

Eliot keeps his hips politely still, letting Quentin do what he wants, but Margo — Margo shoves his head down on Eliot’s cock rough and graceless, catching him off guard, gagging for a second as the head drives against the back of his throat, pulling himself together in the second Margo gives him to catch his breath before sending him back down to — to do it better this time, do it right. He feels fucking electrified with the permission she’s granted him to just give himself over to it, completely, freefalling in this realm of total sensation.

“Oh fuck, Q, that’s so good,” Eliot breathes.

“You take it better than I would have thought,” Margo says. “I guess you really have been craving a dick to choke on.” Quentin moans, mouth full, in arousal or agreement. His neck aches from the angle she’s holding him down at.

“You’re perfect,” Eliot says, voice scraping out of him the way it sounds when he’s getting close, “just perfect for me, Q —”

“Greedy little cockslut,” Margo says, “waiting around for someone to fuck your dirty throat raw —”

“The best,” says Eliot, overflowing love, “you do it so well —”

“Look at your filthy fucking lips,” says Margo, “dying to drink his come, aren’t you —”

“Perfect,” says Eliot, “oh god — _Q_ —”

On his name Eliot bucks forward, coming on Quentin’s working tongue, and Quentin — _does_ want to drink it down, Margo’s right, he’s so fucking greedy, swallowing every drop he can but with Margo holding him still some spills out over his lips, runs down his chin, he must look a mess, he must — god he’s so hard he thinks he’s about to have a fucking stroke —

Margo pulls him off Eliot’s dick and finally lets him go. Quentin feels lightheaded in the absence of her hand. “Well? What’s the verdict?”

“Full marks,” Eliot says. Quentin thinks he’s trying for lofty but he’s looking into Quentin’s eyes as he says it, obviously totally besotted, so it’s not very convincing.

Margo must agree, because she breaks character just long enough to say, “Jesus, you’re embarrassing. Pull it together, okay, I’m still here.” She doesn’t sound mad, though. The High King once more, she says, “I guess I’ll have to see for myself. On your feet, kid, and out of your clothes.”

Quentin stands up so fast he goes a little dizzy. Some part of him feels like he should draw this out, turn it into part of whatever level of performance they're operating at right now, give Margo and Eliot a show to watch, maybe play up the bashfulness — Eliot would love that, he’s pretty sure, and it would suit the whole vibe Margo’s been hitting this evening — but the entire rest of him his fixated on the association between getting his naked and someone touching his dick, and he’s too fucking gone to be patient. He strips in a few hurried motions, flinging his clothes he doesn’t care where, watching the two of them watch him — Margo’s lips an unimpressed line, Eliot’s mouth half-open, somehow both of them exactly what he wants to see — until he’s standing naked for their appreciation and their judgment, erection bobbing awkwardly in front of him.

Margo makes a dispassionate little hum, stepping forward to look him up and down like he’s a horse at a county fair, which is an absurd thing to think and an even more absurd thing to find kind of hot. “So this is what does it for you,” she says over her shoulder to Eliot, diminishing, almost scornful; Quentin feels like if she kept this up long enough he could come into the air just from her disdainful gaze.

“I’m a man of complex and sophisticated tastes,” Eliot says.

Margo laughs at that — a real laugh, white teeth shining in her face. “You fucking wish.” Turning back to Quentin, she commands, “On the bed. Hands above your head.”

Quentin scrambles backwards to fling himself onto the mattress, stretching his arms towards the elaborate metal headboard. “Are we gonna — am I —”

Margo purses her lips and marches over to him, hiking up her gown to straddle his hips. Quentin can barely breathe. She leans forward and pinches his nipple, hard enough to make him wince. “Don’t get cocky because you can suck half-decent cock. You’re here to do as you’re fucking told. Understood?” She fixes him with a look that demands an answer, a look that adds the silent second part of the question: _All good still?_

 _“_ Yeah,” Quentin says, nodding. “Uh — yes, sir. And — thank you,” he adds, in case he’s somehow been unclear.

Margo nods, unsmiling but mollified. Her eyes drift across his figure: his bare chest, his neck bared for her, his arms exactly where she told him to put them. She frowns and reaches a hand forward to trace an inquiring path along the line of his bicep, the curve of his shoulder, looking bemused like she was not expecting to see what she sees. Quentin’s breath hitches. Without looking away but in a voice clearly meant for Eliot she says, “The fuck is this?”

“Don’t get me started,” Eliot says, sounding pained. Quentin flushes, pleased and embarrassed.

“More things on heaven and Earth, Horatio…” Margo shakes herself and leaves the bed. “Now watch how the grown-ups play. Oh,” she says, as if it’s an afterthought, “and — don’t you _dare_ touch your dick until I fucking say so. Or you’ll fucking regret it. I’ll make sure of that. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Quentin says, loving the challenge in her voice and the ache in his cock.

Eliot and Margo start kissing then, the slow, patient kisses of two people who’ve known each other’s bodies for years, caressing each other gently, playfully. Quentin is overcome by the sight — the two of them, their spellbinding beauty and their unspoken closeness, the grace of their lived-in rhythms and the fact that they’re letting him see. That he gets to witness Margo softening and bending in Eliot’s arms, to just _look_ at Eliot upright and tender, loosening with desire and pleasure, every gesture shining with care. They undress each other with little laughs and Quentin almost closes his eyes at the intimacy of their smiles and the loveliness of their limbs, Eliot’s long and elegant, Margo’s taut and smooth. He feels hypnotized by the familiar length of Eliot’s chest with its nest of dark curls pressed against the revelation of Margo’s impossibly gorgeous breasts.

“Do you think he likes this?” Eliot asks, eyeing Quentin’s outstretched body.

Margo laughs rudely. “Look at him. He’s about to make a mess all over himself. Useless brat.” A noise escapes Quentin’s throat of either protest or approval.

“He’s been patient, though,” Eliot says. “Hasn’t he?” Quentin bites his lip, because — he has. He’s been _so_ patient.

“I guess,” Margo says, like this is a favor she’s doing for Eliot. “Sit up, kid.”

Quentin pulls himself into a cross-legged position, trying to ignore the throbbing in his cock. God, he wants someone to touch him, so, so badly, but — but Margo said he can’t, said he’ll regret it if he does, and he wants to live in the world of that _can’t_ more than he wants to get off.

It’s close, though.

Margo gets back into the bed, lying on her back this time, her mesmerizing curves on full and knowing display as she stretches out luxuriously. “God, you really are easy,” she says. “I bet you could jerk off just from staring at my tits.”

“Yeah,” Quentin manages. “I mean — yes, sir. I — Jesus fuck, Margo, you’re so fucking hot.”

She gives him a smile. “I know. Honestly, I should tell you you’re not fit to lick my clit.” Quentin shudders. “But today’s your lucky day.” She gestures at the neatly trimmed triangle of hair below. “Time to put your mouth where the money is.”

As a line it doesn’t really hold logically together, but that’s not really the point here, is it. Quentin just about dives between her legs, feeling like every inch of this is a gift she’s giving him: the flesh of her thighs under his hands, the taste of her slick skin on his mouth, the way her breath stutters when he finds a rhythm and a pressure she likes with his tongue. He could stay here for hours, inhaling the scent of her, skin tingling as he imagines Eliot staring at him, ass in the air, working at something he knows how to do. Listening to her sharp instructions — higher, harder, slower, fuck her with his finger — and her dirty words of approval: “There you fucking go — this is what you were made for, huh — letting me fuck your face as long as I fucking want — using you like — oh, _fuck_ — like a toy —”

“You’re doing so well,” Eliot’s voice says, suddenly hot in his ear, “you’re making her feel so good, Q — you’re so fucking beautiful together —”

Quentin moans against Margo’s cunt, barely able to process that he gets to have all of this at once — it’s so _much_ and he wants _all_ of it with his entire body, greedy as anything, and that’s before — oh fuck —

Eliot works some magic Quentin recognizes but is too out of his mind to place, and then — oh, _fuck_ — he’s pressing his tongue against Quentin’s hole, teasing and soft, driving Quentin wild enough to start shoving his hips backwards, begging without words for more, please — and then, bless him, Eliot gives it to him, licking in with sure strokes that Quentin feels in every goddamn nerve.

Quentin lifts his face to let out a strangled sound, dignity gone, and immediately Eliot stops, leaving him bereft.

“Hey,” Margo snaps, making Quentin’s stomach twist. “I didn’t say you could get distracted, did I?”

“No,” Quentin says, shaking his furiously, “no, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry —”

“Shut it,” she says, sounding bored. “Can you handle it or not?”

“I can,” he says, “I swear, just — let me try again, I promise, I’ll be — good, I —” He’s so turned on he feels fucking drugged.

“Fine,” she says. “But stay fucking focused this time.”

And Quentin is fucking soaring on clouds, but he can do this, he can focus. He can focus on Margo’s clit and her hips rolling slowly against his mouth and the soft pressure against his fingers inside her cunt, even while Eliot is turning him inside the fuck out with his tongue. He feels like his body is undergoing nuclear fission from feeling this many good things at once, but he can focus. He can focus even though his cock is straining painfully thick with blood, begging to be touched. He loves that it hurts, he reminds himself, resisting the temptation to move his hand there, not even to feel good but just to take the edge off a little, he doesn’t need to come he just wants _something_ — and the thing is, he thinks, stomach flipping as Eliot drives his tongue further into him, the thing is Margo said she’d make him regret it, if he did, and he liked living in the promise of that, but maybe — maybe he wants to make her keep it, now. He’s so fucking gone and so fucking greedy and he wants — she’ll think he’s weak, he thinks, the thought making him woozy like a shot of vodka, she’ll think he’s so pathetic, and what the fuck kind of person would want that, the scorn in her eyes while Eliot watches Quentin live with the consequences of losing control — and then she’s coming around his hand with a throaty _yes_ and a congratulatory pull at his hair and that’s so good he can’t fucking think anymore —

Quentin drags his fingers out of Margo’s cunt and wraps them around the base of his dick, heart pounding as he wonders what comes next.

The reaction is instant. Margo sits up, moving herself out of reach of his face; Eliot backs up as if in deference, which — is also hot? Quentin is going to lose it. “Jesus Christ,” she snarls, an exquisite fury in her eyes, “is this what I think it is?”

Quentin nods, looking up at her, feeling shame spread across his skin like sweat under her gaze, loving every second. “I — I’m sorry, I couldn’t —”

“Couldn’t what?” she says, steely. “I want to hear you say it.”

“I couldn’t wait,” he says, voice hoarse. “I — I had to touch myself, I — I was desperate, Margo, you’re so — so good, and you already came, and I —”

“All you had to do was follow instructions, and you couldn’t even handle that,” Margo says. “Had to get your pathetic dick in your hand. Fucking embarassing.” Her glare is merciless. “You remember what I said would happen if you fucked that up?”

“You said,” Quentin says, “you said you’d — make me regret it.” His body is shaking with how bad he wants that.

“I did,” she says. She brings her hand to his chin, roughly, considering, and he thinks it’s a pose more than anything but the instant her fingers make contact he shudders. Margo watches him, taking this in; tightens her grip experimentally.

He lets out a groan, like a fucking breadcrumb leading her to — Jesus, are they really going to —

Margo slides her hand to his cheek. Quentin tightens his grip on his dick but he doesn’t move his hand because if he does he _will_ come, like, instantly. “Is that what you want?” she asks, a note of added seriousness in it. “You want me to make you regret it?”

“Uh huh,” he says, skin on fire. Eliot has a single hand resting softly at the small of his back. “I want that.”

She doesn’t move. “You want me to make it hurt?”

Losing patience he says, “I want you slap my fucking face, Margo.”

“Jesus,” she says even though, come on, she had to know that’s where this was going, “you really are into some sick shit —”

“It’s so sick,” he says, babbling now, “so fucked up, I want it — I want it so much, I want you to make it hurt and then —” He bites his lip, cutting himself off.

But Margo knows exactly where he was going. “Let me guess. Then you want El to kiss it and make it better.”

“Yeah,” he says. It comes out a whisper.

“You two are going to fucking kill me,” she says. And then she winds her hand back and smacks Quentin across the face.

She doesn’t hit him that hard; he has a feeling Margo could go harder. But it’s hard enough to sting for real, to throw him off balance with both the pain and the shocking reality of it, the fact that she just _hit_ his fucking _face_ which is so _wrong_ but not as wrong as the fact that he liked it — “Fuck,” he lets out, dazed. He can barely breathe.

“What do you think?” Margo asks. “Have you learned your fucking lesson?”

Quentin considers the question. He kind of feels like he got what he wanted, and — it didn’t even feel _good_ , exactly, not the way it does when Eliot smacks his ass, those shockwaves of pleasure that accompany the sensation regardless of the context they’ve set for it. He’s not craving another strike, but — but he looks at Margo, her pitiless ferocity, and he thinks about laying himself at her mercy, and he hears himself say, “No. Not yet.”

She takes a breath, letting anticipation stir in his chest, and then — slaps him again, on the other side, fresh; then before he has a chance to react, once more, on the first side, still tender, the skin raw at the new blow.

“What about now?” says Margo.

Quentin feels — out of his body, all body, made of electricity. Perched on the exact precipice he didn’t even know he was hoping to hit. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I got the message.”

Eliot wraps his arms around him from behind, trailing kisses from his shoulder along the crook of his neck up to his face. Quentin lifts his chin to let Eliot plant softness all over him, feeling awash in love and heat, turning his body to kiss him properly — god, for the first time all night. He lets Eliot scoop him into his lap, humming happily into his mouth as their cocks rub aimlessly against each other.

“Alright, boys,” Margo says. “Break it up. I’m not done yet.”

Eliot breaks their kiss but doesn’t move. He tucks a strand of hair behind Quentin’s ear, smiling softly. “Yeah?” he says, in a private voice, a weird reverse of the moment from earlier where Quentin was watching him kiss Margo; now it’s their own intimacy left out for her to see, and Quentin finds he loves how easy it is not to mind it.

“Yeah,” he says, because the sweet making out is nice and all, but he’s now the only person in the room who hasn’t gotten off yet.

Eliot releases his arms from around Quentin’s waist and Quentin shifts to look back at Margo. “What now, your highness?”

He’s a little too punchy by now to play it straight, but she doesn’t seem to mind. In fact she leans over and gives him a deep, thorough kiss. Then she bats her eyelashes at him and says, sugary-sweet, “Baby, I want you to fuck me like I’m your girl.”

Quentin blinks, startled. “Uh — really? That’s — you’re into that?” It seems a very… un-Margo request. And kind of — sexist? No, that doesn’t sound right. Heteronormative, maybe?

Margo laughs in his face. “No, obviously. But El’s gonna flip his shit for it. And we both love that, don’t we?”

“Yeah,” Quentin says automatically, because — they do. They both love him. He looks over his shoulder for confirmation.

Eliot shrugs. Quentin feels a rush of love at the casualness of the gesture while they’re all three sitting naked on Margo’s bed. “Guilty as charged.” He doesn’t sound sorry.

Quentin kisses him lightly. “Okay.” Then he turns back to Margo, spreading herself back out on the bed, feet towards the pillows. Her slender legs parted, waiting for him. “Okay,” he says again, staring at the faint outline of her ribs moving with her breath beneath her breasts, “let’s fucking do this.”

He finds his position above her hips, moving deliberately even as his dick is screaming for any kind of contact. She’s angled her body diagonally on the bed so there’s plenty of room by her head — for Eliot, Quentin realizes, to lie across the bottom of the bed where he has a good view. Quentin shivers, thinking — Eliot will be watching him fuck. Which, like, in a way that’s nothing new — but in another way, it is.

Quentin slides into Margo, groaning instantly at the warm pressure moving along his cock. “Oh _fuck_ , Margo — fuck, fuck that’s so good —”

“Mmm,” she says, hiking up her knees to — oh, shit — let him in just a little deeper, pushing in somewhere that draws a startled gasp out of her. “Damn — I definitely thought this part was going to require more coaching.”

Quentin doesn’t know if she means it or if she’s saying that for Eliot to hear, if he should be insulted or turned on or both. “Yeah, surprise: I actually do know how to fuck.”

Eliot makes a _very_ gratifying sound at that. Quentin steals a glance at his thick fingers working his cock slowly, then looks back down at Margo’s face because if he keeps watching Eliot jerk off this is going to be over hatefully fast.

“Don’t take that one personally,” she says. “Chalk it up to long and unfortunate experience with representatives of your kind.” Her eyes flutter dreamily as he pushes his hips into her and Quentin — likes that more than he would have expected, actually. The proof that he’s fucking her right, up against the memory of all those other guys who didn’t know what they had and didn’t care to figure out — heat snakes down his face.

“I told you,” he says, “I like to do things right.”

“You’re a hard worker,” says Margo. “I respect that. I —” Her sentence veers into a moan, then another one, louder this time, then her hands clutching his back as she shouts “ _Fuck, Quentin_ —” in this breathy voice, and Quentin still doesn’t know what’s an act and what’s real with her but Margo Hanson crying out his name while he fucks into her is too screamingly hot for him to care.

“Fuck,” he says, feeling the pressure building in his body as she moves beneath him, “I — uh, if you want to keep going I might need to switch positions soon, I —”

“I’m almost there,” she pants, and Quentin’s pretty sure Margo wouldn’t bullshit him about that.

“Okay, cool,” he says, sweat dripping down his face, “because like, you know — same —”

“Feel free,” she says, pitched low like it’s just for him, which actually means it’s about what Eliot’s seeing and what Quentin can give him, “to act like a man and fuck me like you don’t give a shit.”

If he had any self-control left in his body, it’s gone after _that_ — the thought of baring his animal selfishness for Eliot to see. Quentin thrusts into Margo’s tight wet cunt, listening to the sounds of her pleasure loud and hungry and for him, and he looks up at Eliot, hand working furiously on his own gorgeous leaking cock, mouth hanging slack, eyes blown dark and wholly transfixed on the sight Quentin and Margo are making, her perfect body wrapped around him, his back arched and hips jerking thoughtless and rough and hard, fucking drowning in sensation as he chases more, more, more, greedy and wild and feeling so so good — “El,” he rasps, “El —”

Eliot is as ever there to catch him. “It’s perfect, Q — you’re perfect, the two of you are perfect — the best thing I’ve ever fucking seen —”

And Quentin comes almost violently into Margo, holding in there while the pulses of her own orgasm clench against him, breathing hard as Eliot finishes himself with a curse and a messy pull, landing a streak on Quentin’s side.

Quentin extricates himself from Margo, which about uses up his remaining capacity for physical movement. “Holy shit, you guys.”

Margo sits up with a preening smile. “I know. We’re amazing.” She leans over to Eliot and gives him a peck on the forehead.

“It’s true,” Eliot says, gazing fondly at her. “We’re a real Fred and Ginger of erotic adventures.”

“Cagney and Lacey with a drawer of double-sided dildos.”

“Benson and Stabler with less sexual tension.”

“Laverne and Shirley for the late-night crowd.”

“Are you this annoying about it every time,” Quentin says, “because if so, I’m having my doubts about a repeat performance.”

Margo flicks his knee, making him grin. “Most people would give their left kidneys to be annoyed by us. Don’t push your luck.”

“Aye aye, captain,” Quentin says.

Margo rolls her eyes at him, but she’s smiling. It seems unquestionable that they are all in very good moods. “I’m gonna wash up. Don’t trash the place while I’m gone.”

“I don’t think I can walk right now, much less fuck up a room,” Quentin says, sprawling onto his back.

Eliot slides into place next to him while Margo shrugs a robe on and heads out. “I told you this night was going to be great no matter what.”

Quentin snuggles up with his face against Eliot’s chest. “I love you,” he says, because he doesn’t remember what other things exist to be said.

“I love you,” says Eliot. “I think —” He strokes the back of Quentin’s hair softly. Quentin feels his eyelids growing heavy. “I kind of actually enjoyed that more than I thought I would. Not that — I mean, I thought it would be fun, obviously. And hot as fuck, which it was. But — I don’t know. You and Margo together — it just felt really nice. Even aside from like, the sex part. Like — all my favorite things happening at once. Or like — I don’t know.”

Quentin thinks of the way sometimes when they’re together Eliot looks like happiness is a miracle he’s afraid to believe in. “Like maybe there’s nothing,” he says, “that’s too good to want.”

Eliot squeezes shoulder. “Yeah. Something like that.”

Quentin hums sleepily. He kind of wants to elaborate on that thought, explain to Eliot how he’s spent his whole life refusing to believe it and some days lately it seems so fucking obvious it’s almost easy, but he’s tired. And they have their entire lives to talk. A thought occurs to him. “I still don’t want you to slap me across the face during sex.”

“Oh?” Eliot’s voice is worried. “You didn’t like that?”

“No, I did, but —” Quentin shrugs. “I don’t know. It was Margo. It’s different.” He lifts his head. “Is that weird?”

Eliot laughs, that deep full-chested laugh of his. “Is it weird that you liked getting slapped across the face during sex, but _only_ by your boyfriend’s best friend during a threesome? Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Yeah, basically,” says Quentin. “Or no, like — is it weird for _you_?”

“I promise I am in no way jealous of Margo for getting to slap you across the face,” Eliot says. “Does that address your concern?”

Quentin thinks about it. “Pretty much.” He rests his head back against Eliot’s body.

“Good,” says Eliot. His voice like his touch is soft.

Quentin wonders if they should move. Margo strikes him as a woman who requires her beauty sleep. But Eliot would tell him, if they had to leave. And he’s cozy and comfortable, here in her royal bed. When she comes back he’s halfway to sleep already, but she gives him a soft kiss on his temple before climbing into bed on Eliot’s other side and Quentin feels it settling over him, his to keep: the actual secret of life, which is that they can make it whatever they want it to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content note:** The scene starting "They hold a quasi-ceremonial dinner..." (last scene in the chapter) features a Marqueliot threesome, with some bonus face-slapping.


	14. Chapter 14

Quentin slips into the sweet-smelling warmth of the coffee shop, feeling a flutter of nerves as he looks around for the face he knows only from one brief encounter and a tiny photograph on a university website. “Dr. Green, hi,” he says, spotting her at a table in the corner, cane leaning against her chair at an angle that should be precarious but which he suspects is charmed to hold fast. He tries to hurry over without looking like he’s hurrying. “Sorry I’m late, I got off the train and went down thirtieth street instead of thirtieth avenue —”

“Queens takes some getting used to,” the professor says, waving off his concern. “This part was developed by a crew of powerful magicians with some eccentric hypotheses about the intersection of geography and numerology. Their ideas weren’t wholly without merit — casting near certain interactions can really juice your circumstances if you know how to work it, and the Ravensdale wards are famously solid if notoriously high-maintenance as a result — but it can make navigating a challenge. And please — you’re not one of my undergrads. Juno is fine.”

Quentin nods, even though the part of him that still feels like a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old is a little more alert in her presence. After he’d emailed her back, he’d thought to look into her work, which might have been a mistake. She’s published _a ton of shit_. And yet here they are, meeting, because she asked, and he said yes.

The place isn’t formal enough to have waiters, but a girl in a hijab pops over from behind the counter with a smile and an oat milk latte like Professor Green — Juno — comes here a lot. Quentin says regular coffee is fine, and once he has a mug to put his hands around he’s feeling more settled. “Thanks again for meeting with me.”

“I’m excited to have the chance to dig into your work,” she says. With a smile she pulls a little purple cylinder out from her bag and offers it to him. “I was able to get the Naturalism department to loan me some space in the greenhouse to try it out.”

“You — oh,” Quentin says, taking the object. It’s heavier than it looks, with a little hole in the top, and — his heart swells to recognize it — the familiar trace of his spell, given a funny alien shading from someone else’s casting but unmistakable, running through its contours. “This is —?”

“A pencil sharpener,” she said. “The one I kept on my desk had broken during some office hours gone slightly awry — occupational hazard, but it had been a high-quality piece. There’s no substitute, I find, for pencil-and-paper when you’re wrestling with some meta-math.” Quentin nods, dazed. “Now it’s much quieter, and there’s no shavings. I’d ask you to try it out here, but it sings, like your coffee maker — Puccini. _Turandot_.”

“Wow.” He wants to say something like _I’m honored_ , but that seems a little intense. Handing it back to her, he settles on, “That’s so cool. I haven’t met anyone else who’s tried it.” As far as he knows there is no one else, but — he published it, didn’t he? For all he knows someone else has.

“It’s an interesting method,” she says. “More demanding than it initially seems, but satisfying, once you’ve managed it. At least I thought so. How did you get interested in alternative mendings?”

“I kind of had to,” Quentin says. “I had a — a magical injury. I couldn’t work my discipline, which is Repair of Small Objects. Couldn’t work any kinesthetic magic, actually. And, uh —” He hesitates. He doesn’t really want to get into — the Seam, or any of that, but — it was never really just about the magic. “It was kind of a messed-up time for me, in general. I guess I was looking for something to — focus on, maybe, other than —” Other than the bladed everyday awfulness of existing in his own skin. “So I started doing some brainstorming, some trial and error, around this problem of — trying to figure out if it was still possible for me to fix things, even though I couldn’t do it like I used to.” He smiles wryly. “That came out a little more meta than I intended.”

“It’s funny how that works, isn’t it?” she says, thoughtful. “Growing up I was a very devoted competitive gymnast. My coach thought I had real talent. It was my whole life, all I cared about. And then when I was thirteen I was hit by a car.”

“Jesus,” Quentin says. “I’m sorry.”

“Drunk driver,” she continues. “Speeding like crazy. I was lucky to survive. That’s what my parents thought, anyway. There was a nurse at the hospital who ran in local hedge circles — she told me it hadn’t been luck that kept my body together.”

“Your magic saved you,” Quentin guesses.

Juno’s smile broadens. “And wouldn’t you know it — when she told me, I didn’t think, _Wow! I can do magic!_ I thought: _Maybe I can still go to the Olympics._ As soon as I got out of the hospital I started spending every spare second — researching and compiling and practicing and hunting, all around the city, for magic anywhere I could get. Sneaking out of the house at all hours to meet up with some shady hedge who promised they could get me ground dragon’s scales, having my life saved more than once in the middle of something reckless by someone who had the sense to see I was a kid who had no idea what I was doing. The things I lived through trying on myself — that’s where luck comes in. My parents thought I was just depressed about the accident, and I suppose in a way they weren’t wrong. You have to understand, I’d been on track to become an Olympic-level athlete. All of that focus went right into looking for ways to fix my body. And stave off a growth spurt.”

“Did it work?” he asks.

She shakes her head, mouth an amused curve. “No. I still use this.” She taps the head of her cane. “But after two years of trying, I was finally getting too tall to keep the dream alive much longer, and I realized — in trying to make myself a gymnast, I’d made myself a magician. Not what I had wanted, but — something I could live with, at least. And that’s what I really needed.” She sips her latte, slowly. Quentin notices a very fine tremor in her hands as she lifts the cup to her lips and places it back down. “That’s where my own interest started, I suppose, although it took me years to make the connection between my professional path and the day I didn’t die. I thought about it when I was reading your article, actually — the section on the potential in contradictions. Because I failed, and I also succeeded. I set out to fix myself, and I did. It only took me some time to realize that was what I had done.”

Quentin breathes deep, taking in her story. Thinking about how long it had taken him to figure out he wanted to live, how much longer to see that he was doing it. “That sounds kind of familiar.”

She smiles at him. “I thought it might.”

*

There’s apparently a portal not too far from the coffee shop that will take him to Grand Central, but Quentin opts to take the N back into Manhattan, listening to an old Rainer Maria album as they sink underground. _I’m not the way I — I’m not the way I thought I was…_ He doesn’t mind the subway; it makes him feel kind of at home, actually, the plastic seats and white lights and the bouncing robotic cadence reminding him to stand clear of the closing doors. It’s always been the plan to come back here, but only recently has he discovered that he still likes New York. Not in the way he did as a melancholy teenager eyeing it wistfully from across the river or a college freshman not half so cynical as he pretended he was feeling as cool as he’d ever managed brandishing the fake ID Julia had procured for him at The Dead Poet to blow off midterm stress. He’d loved the idea of New York then — what it might mean for him to be a person who belonged there. The city of his dreams. Now he likes the city of his memory — even the bad ones. Even crying on the 1 train and throwing up in Morningside Park and the spacious gleaming apartment where his life tore him limb from limb and returned and collapsed all over again — awful things, scenes that still flash through his nightmares, but the city they happened in has softened itself for him like worn leather. He doesn’t understand why. Maybe some counterintuitive nostalgia for the things that kept him alive when he felt like dying. Maybe just tragedy plus time.

Back at the penthouse Quentin unlocks the door and gives a little don’t-mind-me wave as he draws the attention of the trio in the living room. They’ve already picked their conversation back up by the time he hangs his jacket up in the closet and slides into place next to Eliot on the couch, grabbing a handful of the fancy popcorn in a bowl on the coffee table. It’s cheesy, with some other flavor in there. Garlic, maybe?

“If you can bump it up a notch,” Margo is saying, “that makes my life so much easier, diplomacy-wise, because no one has to feel like anyone’s getting the upper hand. They’re annoying, yes, but they’re adults. They know how to raise their hands.”

“First of all,” Julia says, “I’ve been to Council meetings. I _know_ that’s not true. Second of all, none of us have ever done this before, and we definitely haven’t done it before in Fillory. I know you want to get magic stabilized as soon as possible and that will take more people than we can teach right now, but this is functionally a pilot program. I think five’s as high as we can go without compromising safety, which would obviously be a real P. R. disaster.”

“Shit,” Margo says. “Well, I guess we can knock it back to four — Xanthis and whoever she wants to bring along, and two of ours.”

“I vote Fen,” Eliot says.

“If we could maybe _try_ ,” Margo says, “not to make decisions on which the fate of our kingdom may or may not hinge, no pressure, based on sentimental reasons —”

“I am not _sentimental_ ,” Eliot protests. Quentin snorts, because who the fuck is he trying to kid? Eliot elbows him in the side.

“You’re definitely sentimental,” Julia says.

Margo lifts up her palms. “ _Thank_ you.”

“ _But_ ,” Julia goes on, mouth quirked mischievously, “I think Fen’s a good candidate. She’s smart and hardworking, and she already knows a lot about magic and how it works. Plus, she has good… people skills. Xanthis likes her, right? If we can keep people getting along, that’ll make everything easier from a pedagogical _and_ diplomatic perspective.”

Margo lets out a long exhale with her mouth closed. “Fine. Fen’s one.”

“Thank you, Julia,” Eliot says loftily, “for your succinct and compelling argument, despite your unnecessary denigration of my character.” His eyes light up then with that glow like dawn coming in. “Oh my god, she’s going to be so excited. Her little _face_ —”

“Yeah, yeah,” Margo says, rolling her eyes, but her mouth looks fond. “Don’t break the news without me, okay? Who’s number two?”

“I’d say Rafe,” Eliot says, “except I don’t know if he’ll say yes without Abigail. He’s been traveling a lot for work as it is. I think he might want to leave his free time to attend to the nuptial bed.”

“Abigail with magic,” Julia says. “Now _that’s_ an image.”

“Tell me about it,” says Margo. “When I think about that part of me wonders if we should have kept a lid on this whole development.”

“You don’t mean that, Bambi,” Eliot says in that Margo voice that carries a secret meaning just for her.

She fixes him with one of her Eliot looks that signify something only he can decipher. “No, I don’t. But Satan’s ballsack, between setting up time for the actual training and keeping our allies happy — you _know_ Idri is going to get on our case about being let in on the action sooner rather than later — when I was pulling my hair out trying to find a solution for the shortages, I didn’t think it would come with so many goddamn _logistical questions_.”

“Sorry about that,” Quentin pipes up. “Next time I like totally revolutionize the entirety of magic I’ll try to make it more convenient for you.”

Margo glares at him. “Whoever let you think you were cute made a mistake.”

“Pay her no mind,” Eliot says, sweeping an arm around Quentin’s shoulders, which is cozy. “She gets off on this shit. Logistics. Strategy. _Scheduling_. Filthy bitch.”

“Ugh,” says Julia, “I love a schedule. Do you color-code?”

“I was trying,” Margo says, “but too many people want a fucking piece of me. It was like the time I fucked a guy on coke while I was on Xanax — couldn’t find a rhythm.”

“I’ll show you my system,” Julia says. “It’s _so_ good. I bet you can adapt it. Plus I hot-wired a spell to sync up my hard copy planner with Google suite.”

Margo makes a purring noise. “Well _now_ you’ve got me interested.”

“Okay, ladies,” Eliot says, “if we can all keep the obscenity out of our very professional meeting —”

“Speaking of,” Julia says, “Q, how was your meeting with Dr. Green?”

“It was good,” he says with a smile. “She’s done a ton of shit. Sometime when Kady’s around actually we should talk about the outreach stuff Ravensdale does, I feel like there might be a way we can connect with that. She seemed interested. I got her to download Ley Line, at least.” For a moment Quentin considers telling them the other thing she said — all of the other things, but one in particular. He wants to, eventually, but it’s sitting somewhere big and spiked and bright and strange inside him, and he wants to figure it out for himself before he shares it with them. And he kind of likes this, too: having a secret that’s only a temporary secret, feeling like he can keep something his until it’s time to show it to the world. Believing he has the time, because he has a future to have it in. Trusting himself to know when to choose.

“That’s awesome,” Julia says.

“Delightful,” Margo says, “but I have some representatives from the Drifting Wood to give the royal welcome to, so if we could maybe stay focused —”

They keep talking, floating names from the court and debating their pros and cons. Quentin sits and eats popcorn and listens, mostly. This is New York, too: his favorite people making plans. It feels right, the four of them sitting together — a rightness that goes right into his marrow. The sense that something has settled as it should have, if Eliot and Margo and Julia and Quentin are spending an afternoon talking magic and snacking, easy like they’ve been doing it for years. Like this is something that’s belonged to them, all along, and it just took them a while to find their way there.

*

The lot looks different every time Quentin goes back. The fence is threaded through now with all manner of talismans and charms, amulets and protective beads, some secured with spells or elaborate numerologically charged knots adding protective vibrations, others hung loosely beneath a canvas sign reading _Free To A Welcoming Home!_ The corner the Naturalists took over has grown lush and wild, green leaves stretching their curved tips for the sky, vines and blooms spilling out of their pots, filling the air with sweet scents. Someone’s erected a cabinet nearby to start storing clippings, seeds, dried leaves, ground stems, staple mixtures obtained from the available specimen; index cards below glass jars explain in purple ink their uses in spellcraft and healing. There’s always chalk available up near the front; sometimes pink and green designs mimicking the shape of key sigils or runes outlast several rainfalls before washing away.

“I was thinking,” Luisa says, gesturing towards the corner where they first met Hannah, “maybe we could kind of informally establish that area in the back as the place to come if you’re trying to unlock someone’s dormant potential?”

Quentin follows her hand with her gaze. “Do you think we need to?” 

“Probably not,” Luisa says, “but I was doing some reading and talking to Rishi about ambient-concentrated sites. Most of them are associated with groups of non-human creatures, so there’s less about them out there than you might expect, but the consensus seems to be that it’s a dynamic process. Magic knots up, or saturates, or moves faster somewhere, but as that particular anomaly gets used in similar ways repeatedly, it seems to — adjust, kind of. Refine itself to its purpose. It becomes what it does, to a certain extent. So I thought if we designate a spot for — fostering that initial connection, it might get easier over time.” 

“Makes sense,” Quentin says. “And we’re definitely, like, going through with this, right?”

She quirks her mouth wryly. “Are you getting cold feet?”

“Not exactly,” he says, “just — it seems so big. You know, when all this started, for me, Rishi just wanted to free some ghosts, and I just wanted a reason to drag myself out of bed once a week. I never thought it would — expand, like this.”

“No,” she says, “but it kind of makes sense, right? Power in transformation — that’s a bedrock magical principle, obviously, but isn’t it also just — how it usually goes? You start out trying to do one thing, and then the person you need to become in order to do it — it has ripple effects. Changing something changes you.”

Quentin thinks, for the first time in a long while, about the quest — how sure he’d been, at the end, that it had been meant to make him someone cold. He thinks about planting with Xanthis at Whitespire, the way he’d reached her with his bruises and his broken pieces and the things he’d had to learn to survive them. “I guess that’s true. It’s just a lot, when I really try to think it through.”

“Well,” Luisa says, “that’s why we’re starting slow, right? Looping in people we trust, asking them to think of people they trust — it’s not going to happen all at once.”

“No,” says Quentin, “but eventually — maybe not that long from now — it’s going to become something we can’t control.”

Luisa laughs. “My life got a lot easier when I accepted that I can’t control shit.”

“I feel like I’m still working on that one,” Quentin admits. “Like, mostly I’m okay with the fact that life is — random and weird and, and narratively a total fucking mess, but sometimes I still feel like — like shouldn’t there be _something_ we can do?”

“But there are things we can do,” Luisa says. “Your actual specific life isn’t, like, a philosophical abstraction. It’s yours. So maybe we can’t control anything, but we can always choose.”

Quentin looks around at the lot: the cultivated flowers carrying magic deep in their roots, the objects crafted or acquired and left behind as an offering to the space and the people who might come here and the future they’re shaping, bit by bit. A world dazzling to contemplate that’s made up only of hundreds of choices, slotting together to create something beautiful and vast. Like pieces in a mosaic. “I guess you’re right.”

“I’m always right,” Luisa says, flipping her hair sardonically, and Quentin laughs.

*

Penny blips Quentin and Luisa up to Modesto for the first community spellshare hosted by the New Library. In one of the extradimensional conference rooms on the third floor Quentin finds his friends from New York — Eliot and Margo couldn’t get away from royal business, but the others have turned out for support — and talks with Julia about the ongoing plan to set up small-scale Fillorian magical instruction while they eat hors d’oeuvres until Alice dims the lights to let everyone know the event is starting. She’s dressed to the nines and wearing contacts, which Quentin knows means she’s nervous. He doesn’t blame her — it’s a lot of responsibility, trying to usher in a new era of community relations with an institution as old and resistant to change as the Library — and she’s self-critical enough that she’ll probably find flaws no matter what anyone else thinks, but from where Quentin’s standing the evening’s a success. The Library clearly put their Traveler arsenal to good use, judging from the range of accents, languages, and seasonal dress represented. There’s something beautiful about watching a professor from an Egyptian university talk ward sensitivity protocols with a grizzled biker with black stars all along his forearm. It makes Quentin feel the way he does at the lot — excited, and a little alarmed, but safe, too. Like the future that’s coming is someplace good.

After the magic winds down for the evening a Librarian ushers them into another room for a reception. Quentin finds Alice, champagne flute in hand, and wraps her in a hug. “Hey, congratulations.”

“Did you feel like people were tuning out by the end of the demonstration rounds?” Alice says while his arms are still around her. “I wondered if the pacing was off — I didn’t want to overprogram it but I did want to make sure we had a good balance, although it wound up skewing towards the West —”

“Alice,” Quentin says, stepping back so she can see his face, “it was great. Really. You can debrief later, but for now — people learned, people had fun, people met new people — what more could you ask for? Seriously.”

Alice tucks a stand of hair behind her ear, cheeks pinking up. “You’re right. I’m overthinking it. But you’re right.”

“Also,” Quentin says, picking a cocktail shrimp up off his place, “your food situation is like, next-level.”

“Margo let me borrow Josh,” she says. “To consult.”

“He knows his shit,” Quentin says. “You were right about that.”

“It’s not just that,” says Alice. “It matters, obviously, but — I don’t know. I’m really trying to establish a culture here of — bringing good people in, from all over. Because how can we be a place that welcomes all comers to use us as a resource, if that’s not how we run things from inside?”

“That makes sense,” he says. “Like I said, I think you did something awesome tonight. You should let yourself enjoy it.”

She makes a funny wrinkled-nose smile. “I can’t believe you of all people are giving me advice about — enjoying myself. California really has changed you.”

Quentin laughs. “I’m working on it.”

“It’s good,” she says. “And I am too. I’m getting better at it, I think. It’s weird how much easier it is, to just — be me, when I can feel —” She waves at the room of mingling guests. “Connected to something. For so long, you know, I felt so alone, and so — fucked up there. I couldn’t even enjoy my own magic, because I was good at it but it would never be — enough. It was — all these problems, and in return I couldn’t even get what I actually wanted. But it’s different, now that I don’t need it to fix me. Now that I can just let it — be. Mine, and anyone else’s. And I can just — love it, for what it is.”

Quentin thinks about Fillory: the books that saved him, the place he thought he’d matter, the quest he’d given himself over to. Not any of that now — just a place like any other. A place like New York, that changed him for better and for worse but these days it’s hard to mind. A place that holds people he loves. “I get that.”

“It’s funny,” Alice says. “Lately I feel kind of bad for my mother.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Not enough to _talk_ to her,” Alice says with a shudder. “She’s awful. But she’s awful because she can’t see anything outside herself, and — I _hope_ I was never that bad, but — god, that’s a miserable way to live.”

“Tell me about it,” Quentin says.

Alice smiles at him. It feels so fucking good, that he can still do that. “Thanks for coming, by the way. I should have said that earlier.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he says. “You should come to our next one down in San Diego. Or, like —” He shrugs. “Just stop by, to hang. I know you’re busy, but — if you ever have the time. It’d be nice.”

Alice gives him one of her little Alice-nods, small and sure. “I’d like that. Now that things are kind of steady here, I’m starting to think a little about — work-life balance, or whatever. And — I always have the time for you, Q.”

“You, too,” Quentin says, and it feels good to know he means it. To believe he has time stretching out ahead of him, and he can choose to give it to the people he loves.

*

In his stretches of time where he has nothing else to do — no lessons to plan or give, no safehouses to Travel to or calls to make — Quentin heads out to the back porch to sit in the sun and listen to music and read Jane’s book. Lately he’s been listening to this band Hannah got him into while commandeering the speakers in the car, some Brooklyn indie group with nineties-throwback guitar riffs and spun-sugar vocal lines that owe more than a little to Jenny Lewis’s cutting sweetness. _I was raised an East Coast witch, like doing nothing’s sacrilegious…_ It gives him a weird split-vision, listening to this album a teenager told him about on the way home from school, like he’s a thousand years old receiving a missive from The Youth, and somehow young, too, younger than he’s maybe felt since coming back to life — like he’s not done with new things yet. Which, when he says it like that, seems like it should be too obvious to be worth mentioning, but he’s more or less accepted that sometimes the simplest things take him the longest to learn.

_Triple-overtime ambitious — sentimental anxious kid —_

Jane’s a good writer. Her voice is funny and droll, with a constant sense of private amusement, as though she’s letting the reader in on some private joke; reading her sentences, he can picture the mirth sparkling in her eyes in her cottage beyond time. At times she drops the archness to convey some horror or grief plainly, even starkly, never losing her ear for cadence even as she bores sorrow right into Quentin’s heart, an elegantly matter-of-fact recitation of the violence of her family’s lives that more than once has led him to set the book down and just breathe. She was just a kid, when all this started. That’s not news, but somehow it hits him over and over, reading about her courage and her loss.

It’s easy to see why the Quentins who read this book earlier would have hated it. It’s wildly different from Plover’s series; Quentin doesn’t love knowing this about himself, but at twenty-three that alone would have been enough to send him recoiling. Fillory’s capricious magic is as free of logic and causality as it is in both the other books and real life, but here its quirks are presented as occasionally delightful and frequently maddening, if not terrifying. And Jane writes about her own magic without glamor or awe; the development of her power is as slow and effortful as it is for any newly practicing magician. Magic is wondrous, and difficult, and violent, and beautiful, and sometimes very boring. It’s complicated.

Plover’s Chatwins are children’s book heroes, brave and practical and smart, stumbling only to learn the lessons the obstacles of their fairy-tale world are meant to teach them. Martin frets and is comforted, Rupert sighs before accepting the mantle of leadership once more, Jane asks questions that appear pedantic and turn out to save the day. In Jane’s telling, Rupert wears the weight of both the war and his responsibility heavily, allowing it to make him sullen and sharp with his younger siblings, while Martin is frequently inconsolable in ways that leave young Jane frustrated and impatient and fill the adult Jane with an awful knowing compassion she can no longer offer. She’s haunted by her belated discovery of the truth of Martin’s time at Plover’s house and in Fillory, and by the question of what she could have done to save her brother before the best she could hope for was to save Fillory from him instead. She is brave and practical and smart, but she also makes mistakes that can’t be fixed or taken back, leaving her tangled with regret; often she recounts an apparent success and then muses on the doubts that crept in later, the impossibility of ever knowing with complete certainty that she had chosen the right path through the woods. Of course Quentin, freshly minted Brakebills student wanting desperately to believe this was the path that would lead him at last to the brand new self he was meant to be, would have hated hearing this most of all: that sometimes you can’t know. You just have to choose, and hope, and trust yourself to survive whatever’s on the other side.

Reading through her account of their adventure in the Flying Forest, which involves a lot more hysteria and puking than it did in the third book, Quentin thinks about what Alice said about magic — how it’s easier to love now that she doesn’t need it. It’s not hard, now, to appreciate the bizarre, thrilling, tragic, infuriating Fillory Jane writes about. And it’s not even hard to think about his younger self who couldn’t accept any threat to the place he’d convinced himself was his only true lifeline. He looks for the expected humiliation, and it just isn’t there. Mostly he just feels bad for that sentimental anxious kid, so sure that nothing in the real world would ever feel like home the way a fantasy land he’d read about in fifth grade did. So unable to believe in a version of himself who could belong. He remembers what Alice told him, god, is it really years ago now? It must be — that adulthood was seeing with new eyes. He did become a new self, but not how he thought. He’s changed so much more than he thought he could, but none of it has washed away the core of himself he was so desperate to discard. Maybe the biggest change is that he doesn’t want to anymore. When he finishes the chapter he closes the book and looks out at the bay, turquoise waves glinting like scattered diamonds in the sun. He doesn’t have anywhere to be for a while yet, but he doesn’t want to keep reading. He’s in no rush to finish; it’s nice, to sit here in the warmth of April and give himself permission to enjoy the view. The girl from Brooklyn that Hannah likes says _Sometimes nothing is delicious_ , and Quentin thinks maybe that’s another obvious thing it’s taken him a long time to let himself believe.

*

“We’re running low on angelica on the porch,” Luisa says, “is there more?”

“I think so,” says Quentin, looking through the containers assembled on the dining table. A set of safehouses in New England have been vandalized recently in unsettlingly similar ways, most likely by dark practitioners trying to weaken groups they perceive as competition. There’s a group of psychics in the region coordinating with the houses to assess their wards for vulnerabilities, but as the conversation about the best direction to move in unfolded in Ley Line some of the Naturalists in the San Diego group text pointed out that a number of the herbs growing at the lot had protective properties for estates and magical gatherings specifically. Between their output, some equipment on loan from an alchemist Ray’s tight with, and donations of stones like rose quartz and tourmaline from people across the country who had some they didn’t mind parting with, they were able to source enough to assemble fortification kits for the affected covens and other sites in the area that seemed likely to be at risk. Nico had outlined a somewhat involved ritual protocol for putting them together that he seemed confident would juice their power considerably, so Luisa had floated the idea of hosting an event, to make a day of it. Over two dozen people had volunteered to come by. “Maybe Toni took it?”

“Yes, sorry,” says Toni, popping out from the kitchen with the glass jar in hand.

“No worries,” he says, and hands it to Luisa.

“Thanks,” she says. “We should probably start thinking about ordering lunch soon. I was thinking Mexican, maybe?”

“I wouldn’t complain,” he says.

Kady walks up to him as Luisa heads back out. “How are we doing on supplies? I have some contacts me and Penny might be able to hit up if we need to restock.”

Quentin glances through the herbs and minerals on the table, trying to do a quick estimate. “I think we should be okay? I’m eyeballing it, though, and it’s always possible some need to get re-done, so if you want to start putting out some feelers, that might be good.” She nods. “How’s your group doing on pace? I know it’s kind of a big goal.”

Kady rolls her eyes. “You put Julia in the mix, how do you think we’re doing? She heard _jump_ and said _fuck you, gravity_. Half the reason I came down here was to catch a fucking break.”

Quentin smiles. “Yeah, that sounds right.”

“Porter got back to me, by the way,” she says.

“The one Oregon?” Quentin says. “With the fucked up time shit in his backyard?”

“He’s thinking late May it’ll be easier to work with the solar circumstances,” she says. “Gemini season, mutability in the air. Good time for dislodging shit. I told him we could probably come take a look, but I don’t know a good horomancer. Do you?”

“No,” he says, “but we can ask around.”

Kady watches for a moment the activity happening in the house. “This is honestly going great. We should think about other ways to do this kind of shit. Getting people to gather outside of covens or schools. See that there’s other ways to make connections.”

“Yeah.” Quentin follows her gaze, taking it in: Nico double-checking someone’s sigil before a new case gets sealed, Hannah and Edward practicing the use of instruments for extramolecular weighing under the careful eye of Imani’s parents, Luisa and Penny laughing out back as they portion out dried herbs. He’s started having these moments where suddenly the world will seem to halt while he just — holds it, all this love he didn’t know was inside him, the happiness he didn’t know he was capable of, and this is one of them, standing in the house that changed his life and basking in the joy of people coming together to work on something good. Moments that feel like slices of a dream. The house feels _full_ , the way his life feels full. He’s not sure what’s harder to believe: how impossible that once seemed, or how true it’s become.

His thoughts must show on his face because in a low voice Kady says, “You okay?”

“Yeah, just —” His mouth twists into a smile. “Two years ago I was driving across the country setting my life on fire, and now I’m —” He gestures broadly at the scene of purposeful conviviality. “I don’t know what the fuck I would have guessed for my future, but it wouldn’t have been this. It wouldn’t have been —” He swallows. “I don’t know. It’s just weird, sometimes. Not bad, but — I’m kind of still adjusting.”

“Yeah,” she says. “When you realize you didn’t dread waking up this morning, or yesterday either —” Kady shakes her head. “The novelty hasn’t totally worn off for me, either.”

“I was trying to find the thing that would make my life feel actually liveable,” he says, opened up by talking to someone who knows, “and — I mean it turned out it was kind of both nothing and like a million different things, but — I never would have thought that this would be part of it. It is, though.”

“You know I’m not attached to the Big Book,” Kady says, “but the twelfth step is some real shit.”

“Which one is that?” Quentin asks.

“The one about spreading the message to others,” Kady says. “I mean, when they say it they mean AA, but — it’s the _others_ part that matters. You can work on yourself in your fucking Rapunzel princess tower all you want, but it doesn’t feel real until you take that shit out into the world. And it’s not gonna work, keeping it to yourself. No matter how much you wish it would.”

“Yeah,” he says. Two years ago he was on a frantic quest for more and more and more of escapes that were never enough, trying to make himself as alone as he felt. Drowning himself in all the wrong answers to the questions he was afraid to ask. Now when he looks back it seems as simple as opening a door. He knows it wasn’t, and sometimes that scares him a little. How it feels like a trick, like life might have duped him with some sleight of hand, and he might yet wake up empty and alone. He thinks again about what Juno Green said in New York, what he hasn’t told anyone else about because it scares him too. He’s thrown so much away. He hasn’t said anything yet, but he thinks he will, scared or not, when he’s figured out how to carry it. He thinks he can figure that out. His life is full, and he’s trying to learn to trust that he can hold it. In his spirit, and his busy hands, and in the heart that never quite learned to stop wanting, even when it hurt.

*

“I’ll probably be staying through the summer,” Rishi says over leftover vegetarian paella. “Might do some traveling in August — there’s a conference in Copenhagen I’ve applied to, and I’ll probably attend even if I’m not presenting. Good excuse to hop around, see the sights. Denmark’s got some famous apparitions it would be cool to witness in person. Then I have to be back at Featherstone for the fall to teach, but spring is currently open. I might stick around, or I might come back here to do some follow-up.”

“You’ll be looking for a job by then, right?” Quentin asks.

“Yeah,” Rishi says, unexpectedly noncommittal. “Probably, anyway.”

Quentin raises an eyebrow, mouth full of squash. Swallowing, he says, “What do you mean, _probably?_ ”

“I mean —” Rishi tilts his head consideringly. “I came out here to exorcise some ghosts. And I thought I was doing that, you know, because this is like my passion or whatever, but also to get my doctorate and go — wherever. The next step up on the academia ladder. Adjuncting somewhere, maybe — when we finally released them I thought, _fuck yeah, this’ll at least get me on the short list for a tenure-track position_. And don’t get me wrong, that’s still definitely a possibility. I mean, I complain a lot, but I more or less like being an academic, you know — I like the field and I like research and theory and I like that my professional peers are all a bunch of huge nerds. I even like teaching, outside of finals season. But —” He shrugs. “It’s really fucking cool, what’s happening at the site. The magic, and what people are doing with it. What we’re making it into. I like being a part of that. Academia is fun, but it can get lonely, too.”

“Wow,” Quentin says. He’s always thought of Rishi so definitively as an academic that it’s hard to picture him doing anything else. “So what would you do instead?”

Rishi laughs. “Yeah, that’s the million-dollar question, right? I don’t exactly have a plan B — although honestly I should start brainstorming that shit anyway, based on the horror stories I’m hearing from friends this year. The job market is a fucking nightmare. But, like — there’s work to be found for a competent magician who can write a coherent paragraph. I have the skills to move into a lot of sectors. I could go into security, maybe do some freelance energy management. See if there’s any sites someone might pay me to try to clear. Investigate local non-profits, like Luisa’s job.”

“That’d be a big change,” Quentin says.

“Yeah,” says Rishi, “and I mean, who knows? There are some schools in the area that have strong hauntology programs — one in the desert outside Vegas, which isn’t too far, and they’ve _got_ to have a hell of a commute situation set up — maybe one of them will have a position next year and this perfect job will fall into my lap. But if not, you know, it’s nice to feel like there’s something else I could look forward to. Plus —” He hesitates; his gaze shifts downward. “I really do love hauntology. I was pretty sure that I was set to stay here for good. But I’ve spent a long time studying the dead, you know? It might be kind of nice, to spend some time thinking about the living. About — the part that comes after the aftermath.”

Quentin knows Rishi’s not just talking about his research. He thinks about the little girl’s voice off a coast in Jersey; he thinks about his father singing in the car. He thinks about his own hands, casting at the Seam. “Say goodbye to the ghosts.”

Rishi nods. “They’ll always be with me. The way I see it, they’re still with us in La Jolla — it wouldn’t be what it’s becoming if they’d never been there. But maybe I can — let go, some.”

“Enough to make space for something new,” Quentin says, and Rishi smiles.

*

“You almost had it last time,” Quentin says encouragingly, “if you can just — hold it, that’s good, just like that —”

Beth frowns. Quentin can feel her connection faltering and he quickly works to kind of — wrap his own around it, pulling her back in. He doesn’t know if she’s conscious of the process, but she stabilizes after that and he backs off, letting her flow stand on its own strength. Her flow, her power, her magic which an hour ago she’d never used, which she hadn’t even believed when he’d told her yesterday on the phone, but now — “I don’t know if —”

“You don’t have to know,” Quentin cuts her off, which he feels kind of bad about but — she’s _so close_ — “You can worry about knowing later. Right now just — you feel it, right? You feel what’s happening — in you, by you, whatever you want to call it — you feel that?” Beth nods, setting her brows into a determined line. She looks so much like Hannah in that moment it almost makes him laugh. “Just focus on that. Feel your way there, and the knowing will come in over time.”

“You can do it,” Hannah says sweetly from where she’s running her corner of the spell, cross-legged next to Penny. He’s beaming unabashedly at the occasion, and it’s funny how Quentin doesn’t even think that looks weird on him anymore.

And Beth — nods, and bites her lip, and — _pushes_ — Quentin catches Luisa’s eye on his left and the two of them recalibrate their own flow too quickly to put into words to keep things steady, steady, level enough until —

— a final crackling shift, and the air smells like fresh flowers blooming.

“Was that —” Hannah closes her mouth, looking around at the faces of the adults for confirmation. 

Quentin can’t stop himself from grinning, the rush of victory in his blood. He hadn’t really doubted this would work, but it’s another thing to _live_ it. “Congratulations,” he says to Beth, who’s still staring at her hands like she can’t believe what they just did. “You just cast your first spell.”

“Holy shit,” Beth says, sounding dazed.

“How does it feel?” says Luisa.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Beth says again with a disbelieving laugh. A group of friends filling the lot with unpoppable soap bubbles a few feet away offers laudatory whoops and applause.

In one of her rare displays of unself-conscious excitement Hannah launches herself at Beth with a goofy, giddy yelp, and despite nearly toppling to the ground from her weight Beth happily receives her with a wide-open smile. Her eyes are bright and a little misty; Quentin feels himself choking up to match.

“That seems like good news,” Penny says.

“Yeah,” Luisa says softly.

Quentin — can’t speak just yet. Watching the two sisters celebrate, he feels thrilled and proud and something else, too, some deep amazement welling up in him because suddenly it seems so obvious — this is what it’s for, and he didn’t even know. Unlocking the gates of magic, sharing its power, spreading the message, undoing the barriers erected around it — all of that, all of the work they’re doing, the project he’s lucky to be a part of — it’s for this: this connection. The moment that proves the most terrifying miracle of all, that says: You’re not alone here. Not if you don’t want to be; not if you’re brave enough to show up, if you’re willing to try. That’s what magic is, isn’t it? Connecting what’s in you to what’s outside. And it’s awful, the way the world is awful, ugly and violent and full of pain, but it’s beautiful, too. The way the world is beautiful, if you stick around long enough to see it with new eyes.

*

Beth stays for dinner, her usual precocious gravitas lifted for the evening by the joy of the event. Her excitement is contagious; everyone is in high spirits, talking a little louder and laughing a little more than usual. Quentin’s in such a good mood that he finally consents to try some of Toni’s home-fermented kombucha, and honestly? It’s kinda weird, but not bad.

Over rice bowls with tofu and seitan, Beth asks questions about spells and books and theory and how it all works, the kind of thing Hannah has never shown any interest in until tonight when she has the chance to show off for her sister, piping in whenever the conversation lands on something Quentin had felt obligated to explain despite her indifferent gaze. He’d had no idea she was apparently actually listening most of those times, which is both sweet and kind of alarming. He files that away as another useful preview of life with kids, a life where every single thing will matter — exactly what he always thought he wanted, and it’s funny how scary it is, now that he knows what it means. But exciting, too. He’s not not afraid, but he can live with the fear, for something he believes in.

“We should do something to celebrate,” he says when they’re clearing the table for dessert. “Celebrate Beth, and, like — I don’t know, everything, god. It’s been a wild couple months.”

“We have been uncharacteristically decorous since Hannah showed up,” says Luisa. “Maybe now that she’s Traveling pretty well she and Beth can do a sleepover and we can have people over. Maybe they can even stick around for a bit, if Beth feels up to playing chaperone and we promise to keep it tame.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says, “that’d be nice.” His life is good; he feels like that alone is worth a fucking parade.

As they drink tea or coffee and eat strawberries with cashew milk cream, Quentin has another one of those moments, listening to them burble on as the sky dims in the windows: Ray and Penny talking nineties house remixes; Beth asking Rishi about ghost lore, fact and fiction, eyes rapt on every word; Cynthia hiding a laugh as she helps Hannah practice basic kinetic work to lift her fork by casting alone while Toni spots them, catching Hannah’s dropped strawberries in a simple energetic net; Luisa and Nico arguing about the ethics of cryptocurrency. His life is full; he’s not alone. The world is beautiful and wide. And maybe there was a path for him to get here that didn’t cross through this house, with these people, but fuck him if he knows what it was.

“Hey,” he says abruptly to the table at large, “you guys wanna go to Fillory?”

Penny raises an _okay then_ eyebrow; Beth looks like she’s been concussed. Hannah drops her fork on her plate with a clatter and, eyes wide as moons, says, “Fillory like the books?”

“It’s a little weirder than the books,” he says. “But it’s cool. They’re having a kind of royal shindig this weekend, I thought it might be a good time for a visit.”

“Seriously?” says Luisa.

“Yeah,” says Quentin, “I mean, I’d have to see about getting you all on the guest list, but I’m pretty close with the High King, and their event planner is my boyfriend, so I’m pretty confident I can swing it. I mean, if you guys want.”

“Uh, yeah, I want, are you kidding me?” says Luisa.

“I’m definitely in,” says Rishi.

“Sounds fascinating,” says Toni.

“ _Wait_ ,” says Hannah, leaning forward so hard for a second he’s worried she’s going to knock over her chair, “ _you_ have a _boyfriend?_ ”

“ _Hannah_ ,” says Beth, looking mortified, “don’t be _rude_.”

And Quentin laughs, because, like, he _does_ have a boyfriend, and sometimes he still can’t believe it either, and because she’s going to flip the fuck out once they’re on the other side and he feels so lucky that that’s something he can give her, and because in his own way he loves her, this funny sweet sharp bright kid who fell into his life a couple weeks ago, just one of the gifts he never saw coming until his heart was opening up like magic to make room.

*

“Greetings, Children of Earth, denizens of the Western coast, who have journeyed far from the sun-drenched shores. On behalf of High King Margo the destroyer, first democratically elected ruler of Fillory, allow me to humbly, yet with unmistakable regal grace, welcome you to our abundant and progressively less infuriatingly whimsical land.”

“El,” Quentin says, “we really don’t need to go through all this.”

Eliot puts a finger to his lips. “Hush, ingrate.”

“That’s the guy you’re dating?” Hannah says. Beth elbows her.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Quentin says, but he can’t keep fondness from curling the corner of his mouth.

Eliot does a better job at keeping a straight face, but not by much. “There’s nothing quite like being blessed by the wisdom of youth,” he says, eyes sparkling; Quentin suspects if Eliot looks at him he’ll crack up entirely, which makes him feel horribly tender. Stentorian he goes on, “It is my honor and pleasure both as servant to the crown and as part-time citizen of this nation to invite you into our royal carriages for the inaugural tour for Earthly visitors of significant and spectacular Fillorian sights. Well — Fillorian sights the horses can take us to and still be back in time for the evening’s festivities.” In his normal voice he says, “Full disclosure, we’re kind of in beta, but I think we’ll have fun.” With a smile he opens the door of the nearest carriage, beckoning Luisa to step inside. “We’re all here to have fun, right?”

When Quentin had called with around twenty-four hours’ notice to ask the favor, he’d insisted that everyone would be more than happy with a simple visit, but Eliot had about fallen over himself with excitement at the chance to try out the welcome wagon he and Fen have been developing to deploy in Margo’s ideal future of considerably tighter Fillory-Earth relations. “Besides,” he’d said, “it’ll give me something to do other than sit around Whitespire and rearrange the table plans for the millionth time. Bambi and I are not easing each other’s nerves, and I think Josh might literally murder me if I move around the canapes again.” Now that it’s happening, Quentin feels stupid for having doubted him; obviously Eliot is in his element, showing off while making people feel at home. Watching him point out a rare flame-colored bird — “Sorry,” Eliot says, “that’s flame- _covered_ bird — if you look you can see the smoke coming off its tail,” and Hannah says, “Like a Pokémon?” — Quentin is nearly flattened all over again by just the muchness of him, how silly and lovely and gracious and absurd and _Eliot_ he is. Quentin gets to love him, every single day. What the fuck!

They travel along the Silver Banks, peering out the windows of their carriages to watch the bay glinting under the sun. At the Town Harbors they get out so Fen can recite some nautical history and offer up information about the boats made of living wood, who are apparently unionizing under the Muntjac’s leadership? Luisa drifts down to the shoreline to play around with magic and gives a startled laugh when she casts a simple whirlpool spell. (“The ambient’s crazy here if you know anything about reading it, right?” says Quentin, and she says “Oh my god, _yeah_ , that was _weird_.”) In Brighthaven they walk through the outdoor market, admiring the wares on display while Fen picks up supplies for a picnic lunch. Eliot insists on buying Cynthia a phoenix quill he catches her eyeing while Nico flirts with a blonde at the butcher’s stall; Ray strikes up a conversation with a man selling seedlings about particularities of Fillorian herbs. As they pass in their carriages through the outskirts of town Quentin spots a shack that he’s never been to but remembers from the books — Jane finds a sleeping potion there after deciphering cryptic instructions from a useful ghost — and though he suspects the real thing’s not so picturesque he asks if they can stop anyway for Rishi to geek out about an alien apparition. While he’s casting a series of energy readings around the house’s perimeter and shaking his head in amazement, Quentin sidles up next to Beth, who’s spent the day saucer-eyed and mute, to ask, “What do you think?”

She gives a slightly hysterical laugh. “I’m hanging outside a haunted house in fucking Fillory, and you’re asking me what I _think?_ I don’t even know how I would begin to answer that question.”

“I know Fillory can be — a lot,” he says, worried that maybe between this and magic it’s too much, too fast.

Beth shakes her head. “It’s incredible. Just knowing that it’s here — and it’s magic, and magic is real, and I can _do_ it — I don’t know. I feel like the world grew three sizes overnight.” She throws an arm around Hannah’s shoulders. “You really picked the right weirdos to get kidnapped by, kid.”

Hannah wriggles out of her grasp and rolls her eyes.

And the thing is, Quentin knows Fillory, obviously, but today feels new for him, too. Watching his friends marvel at the brightness of the local fauna or at the talking deer who stops them to ask for directions, it feels like seeing this place fresh and unscarred. It reminds him of stepping through the phone booth in England with Julia all those years ago, that instant rush of love, but it’s different, too, now that he doesn’t need it to be anything for him other than what it is. Fillory is awful and dazzling and brutal and wild and somehow he’s found the space in his heart to love it again, the way he loves New York. A place that doesn’t mean anything, except that some of his favorite people have chosen to make it their home. A place that harbors memories sweet and miserable, lonely and loving, terrifying and miraculous — a place that made him who he is. He can’t hate that. Not anymore.

*

They stop at the northern edge of the Southern Orchard to eat, picking unusually colored native fruits from the trees before settling on a rich green tapestry Eliot and Fen spread out for them. Margo meets them there with Josh in tow, all smiles and waves, and it’s funny to watch her representing her position — odd, to see Margo holding a smile so long, but sweet, too, to catch her obvious pride as she inquires about her guests’ favorite sights and answers their questions about local customs and new initiatives. While Toni engages Josh in a conversation about cooking with Fillorian crops, punctuated by many a wry chuckle, Margo comes to sit by Quentin. “So what’s the verdict on Fillory in the modern day?”

“It’s terrific,” Quentin says. “I can’t believe how — functional it is. Thinking about what it was like when we got here, and those first couple years — you’re doing something really amazing, Margo. Just holding it together would be incredible — but it feels like more.”

Margo gives a preening smile. “That’s my job. It’s like sex — if I’m going to do it, I’m going to pull out all the goddamn stops.”

Quentin studies her. “You really like this. Being king. Like, you — _enjoy_ it.”

“Not every second,” Margo says, “but — yeah. I do. I like —” She pauses, considering. “It’s hard — I mean, it’s _fucking_ hard — but I like… the person I have to be, to do it right. I like that there’s something bigger than me, that asks me to be — the best version of myself. Something I can believe in. And sometimes it sucks, but — it’s always worth it.” Wrinkling her nose, she adds, "I guess that’s what some people have kids for, although god knows I have no interest in confirming that hypothesis firsthand.”

Quentin looks over at where Eliot is teaching Hannah a handy levitation spell and thinks about how terrifying his life became the moment she fell into it, and how grateful he is for every last second. “Yeah, that might be part of it.”

“So,” she says, “are you enjoying our metaphorical red carpet? I should warn you Julia got it in her head to tell Fen about focus groups, so you can probably expect some kind of scaled questionnaire coming soon, as follow-up.”

“It’s great,” Quentin says. “Everyone’s having a great time. I think this is the longest I’ve ever seen Hannah go without saying something sarcastic.”

Margo purses her lips lightly. “Yeah, but I didn’t ask about _them_.”

“I’m having a good time, too,” Quentin says. He bites into a fruit that’s kind of like a sweeter version of a kiwi, with vivid blue pulp. “That whole thing about — all the fucking, like, connotations I had here, or whatever — I don’t know, I guess I still kind of do, but — I’m kind of getting used to them. Or, not — that sounded kind of resigned, and that’s not —” He bites his lip; he’s overcomplicating things. “I like being here. Really. Now that I’ve — figured some things out with myself — I mean, I can hop over whenever I want to the magic planet one of my best friends is basically president of. What’s not to love?” It sounds so simple, when he says it like that. It wasn’t simple to get here, but — maybe that part doesn’t need to matter anymore.

“Good,” Margo says sincerely. “I’m glad, Q.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Talking to Jane was a good idea, by the way — she actually helped kind of a lot. So — thanks for the tip.”

Margo smiles, eyes crinkling. “Yeah, she’s smarter than she looks, once you open her up.”

“And thanks for — you know,” Quentin says in a rush, suddenly keenly aware of how much he owes her. “Everything else.”

“Well, that’s sweet, but — I don’t know, actually,” she says, brows furrowed inquisitively. “From where I’m sitting, I should be thanking you. You’re the one that saved my kingdom’s J. Lo-caliber ass.”

Quentin shrugs. “For — I don’t know, asking me? The knife — it fucked with my head for a while, but working on it — it took me some places I needed to go. Kind of like you said, I guess, about being king — I had to do things like figure out a way to be here without losing my shit, and then on the other side of that — I don’t know. It helped, with the rest of my — stuff. And even before that, just — coming by, and talking shit out — thanks for not giving up on me, I guess. Even when I’d — basically told you to. And even though I’d pretty much given up on — myself. And on you.”

“I’m not sure you have your story straight,” she says. “Truth be told, I kind of did give up on you, until you sent me that map. And you sent it, so — you couldn’t have totally given up, either.”

Quentin blinks, startled. “Still — that wasn’t exactly enough to tip the scales.”

Margo laughs. “No, it wasn’t. But —” She chews her lip, thoughtful. “I’m not good at believing in shit. You know that. But I’d watched you believe so hard, so long — I don’t know, Q, it did something to me. Enough that I figured — maybe I could pick up the slack, this one time, if you’d burned that big heart out, and believe — that was still you in there.” Eyes on the ground, she adds, “And like I said, I’m not good at that shit, so — thanks for not making me regret it.”

Quentin ducks his head, off-kilter but warm. “I’d kind of forgotten about the map,” he confesses.

Softly Margo says, “I hadn’t.”

It feels so long ago now. Like it was some other person who’d bought it, who’d dedicated it, who’d sent it off on a thread of hope he didn’t quite dare to believe. Who definitely couldn’t have imagined this tableau, sitting with Margo under the lattice of branching trees in her kingdom with his friends and his love and the memory of their touch resting easy and comfortable between them. But that was Quentin too, he supposes. All along, that was him.

*

Eliot insists on sending him off before the evening’s festivities to get changed into an outfit he apparently had Whitespire’s royal wardrobe crew make special for the occasion. It’s kind of a hybrid piece, not unlike a simple suit but with a distinct Fillorian spin in the drape of its navy blue cloth and the tessellated leaves embroidered in shining silver around the edges of the jacket. Once he’s slipped on the tall black leather boots Eliot gave him to wear with it, Quentin studies the result in the mirror.

He doesn’t know if it’s the novelty of the Fillorian cut to his clothes, or the buzz palpable as soon as they returned to the castle of a special occasion, or some cumulative high from the fact that like ninety percent of the best things he’s done in his life have happened in the past three months, but he looks at his reflection and he thinks — _damn_. He looks fucking great. He looks adult and capable and put-together; he looks sure-footed and content. He looks like a person who goes outside and does things, who laughs and listens and runs fifteen miles a week, like Eliot’s boyfriend and Julia’s best friend and a magician who tried so hard to fix things that he broke magic open along the way. Like the guy who died and the person who after that had to build a life he could keep on living. He looks happy — maybe that’s it.

Also he looks a _little_ like he’s dressed up as a Sexy Pirate for Halloween, but — that’s Fillory for you.

Whitespire’s ballroom is glowing when he walks in, ornate candelabras burning unnaturally golden at the behest of some spell — probably a Shapiro Line, if Quentin had to guess. Up by the domed ceiling a set of Eliot’s old favorites twinkles like neon constellations flickering in and out of the firmament. Tables are stacked high with elegantly plated spreads; trays of jewel-toned drinks glide through the crowd, held aloft by sharply dressed cater-waiters Quentin thinks might be an Earthly hire. The place is packed, seemingly every person Margo and Eliot have ever met on Fillory and elsewhere mingling with citizens of the Fingerlings (Fingerlingers? No, that can’t be right. Fingerlonians?) dressed in opalescent silk. In the back corner an orchestra composed of representatives from both countries is playing an upbeat tune that every now and then veers suspiciously close to what Quentin could swear is a Lady Gaga song; a circle of dancers from the Fingerlings (Fingerlites?) is moving ceremoniously nearby, arms rigid and heads held high.

Julia finds him while he’s helping himself to some spiked punch. “Hey, you,” she says. “I met Xanthis — Margo thought it might be a good idea to introduce us. Feel out the vibes.”

“She’s a character,” Quentin says. “What’d you think?”

“Character is right,” Julia says with a laugh. “I think she liked me, though. I did Bernstein’s Ladder for her, and she _definitely_ liked that.”

“That’s a good one,” Quentin says, picturing the shimmering net flickering between Julia’s graceful hands.

“She showed me some of what she can do, too,” says Julia. “Not bad, for someone just fucking around on her own. I think it’ll be cool to work with her.”

“Yeah?” says Quentin.

Julia shrugs. “It’ll be cool to be a part of bringing magic to the people of Fillory no matter what. But she’s, like, _super_ psyched about it.”

Quentin takes a sip of his drink, pink and bubbly with a citrus flavor. “Who wouldn’t be?”

The dancers from the Fingerlings (Fingerlish? Fingerlishmen?) come to a stop in their circle, drawing scattered applause. The music resumes, a beat that sounds distinctly earthier, and they start inviting onlookers to join them in a looser step. Quentin watches Fen eagerly partner up with a guy who has got to be at _least_ six and a half feet tall while Luisa looks startled but not displeased to find a woman Quentin’s pretty sure he recognizes from Xanthis’s phalanx taking her by the hand.

“I keep meaning to ask you,” Julia says, “although I kind of have a feeling I know the answer — how’s your resolution going? Is this the best year ever?”

“By a fucking landslide,” Quentin says immediately. “Are you kidding me? God, sometimes I feel like I’m fucking dreaming up this — snowglobe universe, where things are — good. When I think about what my life was like, what, two years ago? I was — I mean, fuck, you were there.” He shakes his head, remembering how it felt — like his skin was being needled from the inside out, like he was falling into a black hole of his own miserable gravity, like he was covered in broken glass. Like he was dying, and he didn’t want to stop. “I couldn’t imagine — feeling even kind of marginally okay, much less — this.” He gestures aimlessly, trying to indicate both the spectacle and grandeur of the occasion which is only in fact a small sliver of what’s to come from what he did and simultaneously the simple fact of having a nice time with his friends. Somehow the two things feel equally miraculous. “I was so locked in, I had no idea how to get out. I didn’t even know how to want to.”

Julia makes a little hum. “I remember you saying something like that, before I left San Diego, but — you were the one who decided to stay. So — I think something in you knew. And wanted it. Even if it was — buried under all the other shit.”

All that bottomless aching and every stupid thing he did trying to shut it out — it feels a lifetime ago, now. Which, like — in one sense, it kinda was. “Maybe,” he says. “I’m really sorry, Jules. For how things were, when we left New York. I know I’ve apologized before, but — I don’t know. It’s still true, I guess.”

Julia gives him a crooked smile. “You figured it out eventually. That’s what counts.”

“Is it really that simple?” he wonders.

“It is for me,” she says.

Quentin loves that about her — her certainty, the definitive way she sets order on her world. He’s not like that, doesn’t think he ever will be, but — maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s okay, for one of them to be a little less sure. Maybe it’s part of what she likes about him, too. “What about you? How’s marathon training going?”

She pulls a face. “I’m on a one-drink limit tonight for tomorrow’s long run. Speaking of, I gotta get some carbs in me if I’m gonna hit my macros.” She gives him a peck on the cheek and swans off in the direction of a table loaded with baked goods.

Quentin lets himself drift after that: chatting with Rafe about Whitespire’s plans for the annual spring holiday; asking a woman from the Fingerlings (Fingerlese?) about the history of their spearcraft, about which she’s eager to share; complimenting Josh on the spread and laughing with warm recognition at his litany of complaints about Eliot’s perfectionism; teaching Xanthis a teeny little light spell, because why not, and enjoying her delighted smile when she manages to set it off; getting surprised by a goodnight hug from Hannah when she and Beth blip back to Earth for an early bedtime. It feels good, waving them off ecstatic and tired, knowing he managed to do something nice for two people who really fucking deserved it. It feels good to wander the room purposeless and unhurried, happy to connect and content to take in the bustling scene, with no sense that there’s anyone else he’s supposed to be.

He runs into Rishi by the one of the dessert tables, staring pensively into space. “Hey. Having fun?”

“What?” Rishi says, startled. “Oh — sorry. Yeah. Yeah, this is — awesome, thank you so much for inviting us. Today has been insane. Good insane, not, like, job search insane.”

“I’m glad,” says Quentin, furrowing his brow. Rishi seems distracted, but — maybe it’s just the job thing.

“So, uh,” Rishi says, in a voice just a hair to the side of casual, “your friend Alice. What’s her, like. Deal?”

Well, _this_ is interesting. “Alice?” Quentin says, smile spreading in amusement. “She works for the New Library, has been pretty instrumental in shifting things in a more progressive direction. Phosphoromancer, another one of our Brakebills dropouts.” He takes a drink. “Also, she’s single, if that’s what you’re really asking.”

“I’m not,” Rishi says, attempting an endearingly failed scoff, “why would — we got to talking, is all, and — she had some _wild_ shit to say about Meyers’s Taxonomy, which like, even in grad school I almost never meet anyone else who has even _read_ Meyers — but that was just — it was interesting, you know, so — she is, though?”

He can’t shut off the flare of hope in his eyes. It’s honestly cute. “Yeah,” says Quentin. “I’m pretty sure.” He’s not a thousand percent confident Alice would come to him with the news if she were seeing anyone, but — theirs is not a social circle known for its discretion. Someone would have spilled.

“That’s — okay.” Rishi crosses his arms and nods a few too many times. “Okay. I mean — okay.”

“You should probably know,” Quentin says, because it’s going to come up, “that she and I dated for, like — I don’t know, somewhere between six months and four years on, depending on how you’re counting. On and off, on the higher end, but.”

“Whoa.” Rishi looks alarmed. “There’s gotta be a story there, right?”

And Quentin laughs, because — like, there _is_ , right, with him and Alice, complicated and beautiful and devastating and long, a story about magic and power, love and haunting, heartbreak and devotion, a story that crosses continents and worlds and literal life and actual death — you want epic, there it fucking is — but it doesn’t feel that way anymore. “Not really,” he says. “We were young and fucked up and crazy about each other, and now we aren’t any of those things.”

“Huh.” Rishi’s eyes keep drifting back over the crowd; Quentin follows his gaze to see Alice, smiling uncertainly as she talks to Fen. “Anything else I should know?”

“She’s a total genius,” Quentin says, “although you probably already figured that out, and a phenomenal magician, and one of the best people I know. And you should go for it.” Rishi’s eyebrows jump up. “Seriously. I think you guys could really hit it off.” He means it — two brilliant minds who deserve big hearts.

Rishi nods, biting his lip. He’s still watching Alice from afar. “I mean I’m not trying to jump into anything,” he says.

“No,” Quentin says, “of course not.”

“I don’t even know where I’ll be living in a year.”

“Right.”

“And we could, like — I mean we could try it out and turn out to have nothing in common except for Meyers.”

“You could.” Quentin takes a bite of a raspberry croissant. “But that’s the fucking process, right?”

“I guess so.” Rishi blows out a breath through his lips. “Jesus, I haven’t done this shit in _so long_.” He downs the last bit of his drink and sets the glass on the tray of a passing waiter before stalking off with a faint gleam of determination in his eyes.

Quentin watches him sidle up to Alice long enough to see the real pleasure on her face when she catches sight of him, then heads off in another direction. He’ll hear about whatever he needs to hear about soon enough.

He hasn’t had a real chance to to talk to Eliot yet tonight, so he scans the room until he spots him standing on the outskirts of the crowd, surveying his handiwork. “Hey, you,” Quentin says as he steps into place next to him, enjoying the way the line between Eliot’s brows eases as Quentin comes close. This doesn’t feel like a complicated story anymore, either. It feels like the simplest story of all. The story that goes: _We fell in love_. “Great party.”

“You think?” There’s a trace of anxiety in Eliot’s voice. “Bambi sees this as kind of a soft launch for the brave new world of Earth-Fillory relations, so — I did kind of want it to be memorable.”

“I do.” Quentin pauses, reflecting. It’s not just that the decorations are lovely and the food is good and the music, to borrow Eliot’s phrase, slaps probably harder than anything else that’s ever played these halls. There’s an air of generosity, an almost tangible welcome to the proceedings, the clear sense that every piece has been carefully selected to make a whole that you, the guest, will cherish in the years to come — that’s Eliot, all the way through. “It feels like you really want everyone to be here tonight,” he says. “You’re good at that — I don’t know if you even know that that’s a skill you have, but you are. Making people feel wanted. Like you really care.”

Eliot blinks, ducks his gaze. Quentin loves him so much it feels like a cellular mutation. “Well,” he says, as bashful as Eliot ever gets, “I do care. So — that’s good.”

Quentin smiles. He shifts so that he’s standing where he can slip his hand into Eliot’s hand; Eliot laces their fingers together with a little squeeze. The two of them stand side-by-side watching, a while: the dancers getting unexpectedly raucous on the other side of the ballroom as one of the musicians pounds an enormous drum; curious exchanges and friendly smiles from people who grew up in different dimensions; the occasional tremor of a spell set in advance to go off — Eliot’s calculations on the time webbing must have taken ages — or else being worked fresh by excited hands. Quentin spots Julia deep in conversation with a magician he doesn’t know, and Margo holding the rapt attention of a circle of admirers telling a story Eliot’s probably heard a dozen times, a playful gleam in her eyes and a smirk at her lips. It is a good night. A night that feels like a signpost on his life right now, that seems to say: whatever you were looking for, you’ve found it. Not on Earth, or in Fillory, or in magic itself, but somewhere beyond that. Some nameless place where you’ve finally learned how to stay.

It feels — grounding, and electrifying. Like loving Eliot does, sometimes — both a weight anchoring him firmly to solid ground, and a burst of softness lighter than air rendering him buoyant, floating among the clouds. It fills him up, this newfound steadiness, makes him want to do something bold and maybe a little wild to relish his lack of fear. To show it off, a little — maybe even that.

“So,” he says casually, “is this the kind of event you had in mind back when you used to think about wanting to show me off?”

Eliot makes a little choking sound. “I — uh. Um. Excuse me?”

That’s a promising start. “That’s what you said, right?” Quentin can’t remember the exact wording, but the image of it had burned itself into his mind, somewhere deep he’s finally ready to look. “When we lived in Fillory you wished you could take me out somewhere? Get off on knowing that everyone else wanted your boyfriend? Unless I’m misremembering.”

“N — no,” Eliot says haltingly. “No that sounds — like something I’d say.”

“Good,” says Quentin. “Because otherwise I’d feel pretty bad standing here holding your hand, thinking about how easy it would be for me to fuck someone else tonight.” Obviously he’d been thinking of no such thing, but he has a hunch this is the version that will be more fun for Eliot.

“ _Jesus_ ,” Eliot breathes; score one for Quentin’s instincts.

“Like her,” Quentin says, gesturing with his chin to a woman in a dark red dress. He’s too focused on imagining Eliot’s reaction to even process what she looks like, but that’s not the point here. “Pour her a drink, make a toast to the occasion, laugh in all the right places — I could get her under me in less than an hour.” He glances up at Eliot then, checking to see if he’s pushing the act too far. Eliot is staring at him _literally_ slack-jawed, blinking in helpless bafflement like can’t decide whether to drag Quentin to the nearest broom closet or take him to get his head examined. It would be kind of funny if it weren’t so hot. Or, like — maybe it’s both? “Was that the kind of thing that did it for you? You know, hypothetically.”

“I kind of hate that the answer is yes,” Eliot murmurs, “but — you could say that.”

Quentin nods, taking this in. “It doesn’t have to be her,” he says, keeping his tone conversational. “I’ve got options. I mean —” He bites his cheek, a blush running through his face. It feels weird, donning an arrogance that isn’t really his, foreign and uncomfortable like a suit that doesn’t quite fit. But he kind of likes it, too — the newness, the sense of falling without a net. He likes the way Eliot looks like he’s working very hard to hold his face still, the trust that wherever this takes them it’s somewhere they’ll go together.

Also — he really has had sex with, like, _so_ many people. He’s not _totally_ talking out of his ass. 

“Look at me,” he says, pushing through the heat in his skin, feeling himself start to like it. Adorably, Eliot does, eyeing him up and down. “Who the fuck wouldn’t want this?”

“No one,” Eliot whispers, like that was a real question. He’s gripping Quentin’s hand tight.

“Him,” Quentin says, turning his gaze to a guy whose primary distinguishing feature is that he’s tall, “you know, once upon a time I would’ve looked at a guy like that and said, no way. Out of my fucking league. But — come on. I could get him to let me suck his cock, no question.” His heart has started beating hard. There’s a sense of danger here, the invitation of an old set of habits developed under conditions he hopes never to repeat. Summoning up the version of himself who did this every night to chase a resolution that wasn’t coming. But that’s not what this is, and truth be told he’s enjoying the thrill of that closeness, more than he would have expected. Discovering that he can play with that fire and not get burned. “On my knees for him somewhere, hearing him say my name — I could get that, if I wanted.” He pauses, both for effect and to compose himself. He needs to cut this off soon or they’ll be heading into public indecency territory. “But I’m not going to. You know why?”

Eliot makes a wonderful strangled whimpering sound.

“Because,” Quentin says, looking now right into his gorgeous eyes, “you’re the only one that gets to take me home.”

“Q,” Eliot says, “I — you — what the — _fuck_ did you put in your drink?”

Grinning, Quentin makes a show of setting his near-full glass on the nearest table. “Nothing,” he says, “but you’re right. I should probably clear my head a little. I’ll catch up with you later, babe.” He lifts Eliot’s hand to plant a soft kiss on his knuckles and then drops it, walking off in Kady’s direction. He can’t resist one look back at Eliot when he’s halfway across the room, and he glances over his shoulder to see Eliot staring at him in disbelief and awe. Like the best thing that’s ever happened to him just got a little better.

*

After the band has played its last stirring number — after goodbyes have been said and the delegation from the Fingerlings have departed to their islands — after the ballroom has cleared out and the cater-waiters have run their clean-up spells and guests have left to sleep in Fillory or California or New York — Eliot murmurs “Let’s go to bed, hm?” in Quentin’s ear and places a lightly possessive hand on the small of his back that sends an enticing tension through Quentin’s stomach as Eliot leads him through arched halls and up the stone stairs and into his bedroom where he slams the door shut behind him with thrilling finality and pushes Quentin by the shoulders against the wall.

“Geez, El,” Quentin says, warming up under the pent-up ferocity in Eliot’s eyes, “way to romance a guy.”

“Shut your filthy fucking mouth,” Eliot says, and leans down to give him a vicious kiss.

It’s zero to a couple goddamn hundred in Quentin’s body, every nerve blisteringly awake as Eliot kisses him hot and sharp-edged and mean, a kiss like he’s taking something he knows Quentin’s been dying to give. Eliot grips his body tight and under the strength of his hands Quentin feels wanted and welcome, the rest of the world vanishing like a film dissolve under the heat of Eliot’s touch. He’s frantic with the evidence of Eliot’s desire, the need Quentin can feel in his every move, the way he’s been waiting for it. The heady awareness that he set out to play Eliot like a fucking fiddle, and it _worked_.

He feels like there’s nothing he can’t do.

“So,” Quentin says, trying to keep it light as Eliot drags his teeth along the shell of Quentin’s ear, “is Margo joining us tonight?” He’s pretty sure he knows the answer, but he wants to hear Eliot say it.

Eliot breathes a rough laugh into his ear, sending shockwaves down his spine. “Not a chance. Tonight —” He fists into Quentin’s hair, tipping his head back so that his neck is exposed; Quentin lets out a startledopen noise, chest sagging. “Tonight, you’re fucking mine.”

“Oh fuck,” Quentin says weakly. If Eliot weren’t there to hold him up he thinks he might fall to his knees.

Eliot laughs again. “That’s right.”

He — _handles_ Quentin, Jesus Christ, grabbing at his collar and pushing him until Quentin nearly trips onto the bed, so happy with how the night is unfolding he feels almost delirious. Quentin scrambles onto his back just in time to see Eliot bearing down on him, hands going straight for Quentin’s wrists to pin him contentedly in place. He squirms under Eliot’s weight, eyes fixed on Eliot’s eager face watching Quentin push fruitlessly against him until all the strain has leached out of his body and he lies under Eliot, limbs liquid and dick more than halfway to hard, breath coming shallowly as he waits in the delicious interminable press of Eliot’s stillness to find out what’s next.

“You really are just — getting straight to the point tonight,” Quentin manages. “Whatever happened to your narrative arcs?”

“Come the fuck on,” Eliot hisses, pushing Quentin into the mattress so hard it’s right at the edge of pain. “What the goddamn hell else did you want, running your mouth like that, huh?” Quentin shivers at the edge of blame in Eliot’s tone. “Getting me going — _bragging_ about who you could fuck, if you weren’t —”

“Yours,” Quentin offers, feeling the heat of his own daring wash over him, reflected through Eliot’s voice bringing it back. He can see that Eliot likes it too: the completeness in its simplicity, Quentin waiting and eager beneath him giving over every part and accepting every wish. He presses his hips against Quentin’s hips, a slow roll that lets Quentin feel the length of his hard-on, eyes never leaving Quentin’s face. Quentin feels ready for anything, loose and happy and _good_ , so good here under the guy he loves, the one he wants like no one else. “If I weren’t yours, El —” And he kind of meant to leave it there, all romantic or whatever, but his body is moving faster than his mind and he goes on, looking Eliot right in the eye: “If I weren’t yours I could fuck whoever the hell I wanted.”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Eliot says, wild-eyed. “Where the fuck did you come up with this shit?”

Quentin can’t help but laugh. “I don’t know, maybe from all the people I’ve slept with? We live in a democracy, and the votes are in. Enough hot strangers suck your cock, I guess you get kind of spoiled. Start assuming anyone will let you stick your dick in them, if you ask right.” He’s flushing hugely, he sounds like _such a douchebag_ , he can’t believe himself, he can’t believe how much he loves the groan Eliot lets out just looking down at him saying these ridiculous fucked-up things. The way Eliot’s watching him play this part. “Why so surprised? You don’t think I’m hot enough for it?”

“Oh shut _up_ ,” Eliot says, sounding half-exasperated for real which is for some reason stupidly hot. “Of course you are — you’re the fucking hottest person I’ve ever seen, of course you could have any pretty thing you wanted — but you’re not gonna — are you —”

“No,” Quentin says, shaking his head, “no, I’m not going to do anything you don’t want — not one single thing that’s not for you, because —”

“You’re mine,” Eliot says again. This time it’s almost reverent.

Quentin nods. “I’m yours.” He fucking likes that — the taste of it in his mouth. The way it leaves him floating through space, tethered only by Eliot’s gravitational pull.

“Get your fucking clothes off,” Eliot says, “I’ve waited long enough.” He punctuates the thought with a final sharp press down before releasing Quentin to do his bidding. Quentin feels lightheaded at the sudden freedom.

He yanks his clothes off as quickly as possible, wrestling a little longer than he’d like with those fucking boots before finally tossing his underwear unceremoniously to the side and leaning back on his hands in wait, leaving his erection as an invitation. He thought Eliot might just watch him strip again, which would be hot, but apparently Quentin’s got him too impatient for that tonight, which is even hotter, shedding his many elegant layers with a force that matches the plucked string vibrating all through the line of Quentin’s center. Eliot is so hot, so unbelievably fucking hot — gorgeous in the torchlight transforming from beautifully put together to naked and wild, cock bobbing huge and thick in front of him, giving himself a few slow strokes with his exquisite hand as he surveys Quentin in position.

“So,” he says, aiming for silky but too hungry to hit it, “what now?”

Quentin says, “Whatever you want.” It comes out nearly voiceless.

Eliot walks slowly around the bed, _struts_ almost, hand lazily wrapped around his dick, eyes on Quentin the whole time. He kneels on the mattress, leaning over to give Quentin a kiss. A surprising kiss — tender and sweet to start, almost like Eliot can’t quite help himself for a second before he bites agreeably at Quentin’s lip, dragging his teeth there as he slides his hand around the back of Quentin’s neck. “I think,” he says consideringly, still holding Quentin so that their faces are close, “I want to look at you. Hm? All those places that no one else gets to see.”

Quentin nods, brain cells shutting down by the second. “You want — should I stay here, or — stand, or —”

Eliot smirks. “Hold that thought.” He stands up and opens the doors of his enormous wooden armoire, rifling through its contents until he turns back to him bearing — Quentin shudders to see it, his whole body tightening in anticipation — a long green scarf. “I think you know what to do next.”

Quentin falls backward like a boulder knocked him over and sends his arms up, barely able to breathe as Eliot binds his wrists together tight, tight — “Tighter,” he gasps, and his hips buck up as Eliot obliges, studying Quentin’s face with his lips parted as he casts to pin the other end — _fuck_ — to the headboard.

“There we go,” Eliot says. He traces a hand down the middle of Quentin’s chest. “Now I can watch you as long as I want. It’s like Christmas come early — pretty little thing all tied up for me to play with.”

Quentin thinks about saying _You can do anything to me as long as you want_ , or maybe _Keep talking like that and Christmas won’t be the only thing coming early._ Instead he says, “What about my legs?”

Eliot raises an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“My — my feet, my ankles,” Quentin says, “I just thought —” _I want you to tie me to the bed so I can’t move so bad I’m about to nut just thinking about it_. “You said you wanted to look, I thought — isn’t that a better view?”

Eliot blinks, briefly thrown. “You really are just — full of ideas tonight, aren’t you?”

“I’m a goddamn treasure trove,” says Quentin.

Eliot laughs, a single bright peal showing all his teeth. “Give me a second.” He hits up the armoire again and comes back with a mismatched pair of fabric contraptions Quentin is too turned on to pay much attention to. “Open wide for me.”

“I’ll do anything for you,” Quentin says automatically, idiotically, spreading his legs.

He watches Eliot fasten him in place to the posts at the foot of the bed, using a quick tut sequence to secure his binds, and then — _god_. Then Quentin is tied up, ankles wrapped tight and unveiling themselves as a heretofore unknown source of erotic tension as he kicks helplessly, feeling his legs strain without consequence, and Eliot is stepping back to admire his handiwork. Quentin — _loves_ this, fuck, loves Eliot’s eyes raking over him while he works his dick, loves the sense of being on display for Eliot’s eyes to see.

“God, look at you,” Eliot says, too raw to be part of any game. Like he really just looks at Quentin and sees — exactly what he wants to be looking at. It’s almost enough for Quentin to come undone entirely, the sincere wanting pouring out of his voice, shining from his eyes. So clear Quentin can nearly feel it coating its skin.

Eliot comes back into the bed, every motion slow, thoughtful; Quentin loves the way he uses his body to move, his leonine grace. He places a hand on Quentin’s inner thigh, near his groin, and Quentin’s hips jump at even that light touch. Eliot’s mouth does something between a smirk and a smile, mocking and fond, predatory and sweet — everything, he’s everything, always — and he takes this as encouragement to start smoothing his palms along Quentin’s skin, an affectionate tease that hits Quentin’s electrified nerves like a lightning storm. “Your thighs,” Eliot’s saying, “I love your fucking thighs — I think about them when I’m jerking off — how they move — how they feel —” He drags his nails down along the outside and Quentin moans at the sting. “How they fucking _taste_ —” And Eliot dives down to bite and lick along them, up and down, tonguing the — underside of Quentin’s _knee_ , which feels amazing, _what?_ Quentin is writhing at the touch and the heat and the way every time his body moves it comes up against the restraints Eliot set for him, that friction and that _hold_ , the jolt that says as sure as Eliot’s voice _you’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine_ —

“No one else,” Quentin says, breathing hard, “no one else gets me like this — _fuck_ , El —” 

“That’s right,” Eliot says, shifting to hold Quentin’s hips down, _yes_ , hands agonizingly close to his untouched cock, “I’m the only — I’m your only —”

“Only you,” Quentin sighs. Eliot’s moving up along his his torso now, scraping with teeth and tongue at his abdomen, his ribcage fluttering up and down with his breath, biting just hard enough and long enough at his nipple — heaven, he’s in heaven, he could lie here forever — “Only you make feel this fucking good. And —” He’s too zoned out to stop the words bubbling out of his mouth with a laugh. “I would fucking know.”

Eliot, mercifully, laughs too, breath blowing hot against the wet skin of Quentin’s collarbone. “I guess you would.”

“I bet you like that,” Quentin hears himself say before he can think it through. For a second he’s horrified at his own traitorous mouth, but Eliot gives a sharp intake of breath that lets him know he’s onto something real. “I bet,” he says again, heart pounding with nerves and excitement, with that freefall breeze of the unknown and the thrill of something new, “some part of you likes knowing — I’ve seen what else is out there, and I still came back to you.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eliot says, pushing his cock against Quentin’s cock, uncharacteristically graceless in a way that goes right through Quentin’s chest. His eyes are blown dark, fixed on Quentin’s face.

“I mean,” Quentin says, steadily returning his gaze even as he feels fucking molten beneath the skin, “I’ve fucked _so_ many people by now, El. And some of them were fucking good. Some of them knew how to fuck me right, knew their way around sucking cock. Some of them honestly were pretty goddamn hot. But none of them were you. No one else makes me fucking crazy like you. No one else — takes _care_ of me like you, _fuck_ — gives me everything I want —”

“I do,” Eliot pants, “I will, I want —”

“You do,” Quentin says, struck even in the throes of arousal with full-body tremor of love. “And I bet there’s some part of you that likes knowing — I’ve had all that, and I still want only you.”

“Q,” Eliot says, almost a whimper.

“You like,” Quentin goes on, pulse in his neck, feeling the dangerous edge of the truth of it even as he speaks, “knowing that I finally figured out — I do have a choice. I have all the choices I could possibly want. And I’ll always choose you, El. Only you.”

Eliot makes a sound that starts as a word and ends as something else, caught out and undone and raw. “Yeah,” he manages finally, and it feels like an admission that Quentin gets to keep, somewhere secret and safe. “I like — Jesus _Christ_ , Q, I —”

“So now that I’m yours,” Quentin says, “what are going to do to me?”

For a moment Eliot attempts to compose himself enough to give a fun sexy answer, but after another drag of his hip he abandons the effort and — oh, fuck, _yes_ , Eliot is _so_ good to him, _god_ — crawls up Quentin’s body until he’s kneeling above his face, hypnotically huge cock red and leaking inches from Quentin’s lips. In a low wrecked voice he says, “I’m gonna fuck that dirty mouth of yours until you’re swallowing me down.”

Quentin opens wide, muscle memory bringing his arms forward just to run up against a fresh reminder of where he is — held in place at Eliot’s mercy, waiting to be put to Eliot’s use.

There’s nowhere else he’d rather be.

Eliot thrusts his dick into Quentin’s mouth and Quentin blanks out, a little. He loses track of time and memory of the outside world, his entire self blissfully reduced to the joy of pulling Eliot’s pleasure out of him, that sweet clarity that nothing else matters, not his ankles tugging at their restraints or his own cock achingly hard in the lonesome air, not one thing except making Eliot feel good. Eliot has skipped his usual slow teasing pulls, like there’s nowhere he needs to work up to; he’s pushing short and sharp into Quentin’s mouth, brushing right against that too-far place in a way Quentin loves mustering the concentration to handle, loves the sense — god, he’s really a piece of work — that there’s something he has to fight to prove. Prove that he can take it, prove that he wants it, wants El, prove that every hidden piece of Eliot’s selfishness is something he can love.

It’s over shockingly quickly, Eliot’s come filling his mouth so suddenly he has to scramble to swallow it down. Quentin doesn’t know if Eliot really does get off thinking about other people wanting to fuck his boyfriend or if it’s just one of those nights, but either way he’s feeling pretty smug.

After Eliot pulls back he gives Quentin — it’s the sweetest thing — a long kiss on the forehead. “You’re so good,” he says fondly. Quentin gives a contented sigh.

Eliot kisses his way down Quentin’s face, along his jaw, his neck, gentle little presses of warmth reminding Quentin of how wound up he already is, following the line between his ribs all the way down until he’s nuzzling at the base of Quentin’s dick, a weird mix of cute and tempting that Quentin can barely process. “I was going to free up your legs,” Eliot says conversationally. “Just, you know, for the logistics. But you look so goddamn pretty like this —” An embarrassing choked sound escapes Quentin’s throat. “I just can’t bring myself to do it yet.”

Eliot — starts with Quentin’s balls, fuck, taking them into his mouth one at a time, tugging gently downwards as he massages them with his tongue. Then he’s on Quentin’s dick, lathing the head in excruciatingly slow circles before he finally, _finally_ takes him in root-deep, his perfect mouth firm and in control as he works Quentin with zest and expertise, slowly for just a minute before he speeds up with a steady rhythm that reverberates through every cell in Quentin’s body. Quentin can’t take his eyes off the sight of Eliot’s tousled curls falling gorgeously in his face as he sucks Quentin’s cock like he’s been waiting years.

A quick one-handed tut and then — “Oh, _fuck_ ,” Quentin groans — Eliot is snaking one long slick finger inside Quentin, lighting up more nerves than Quentin knew he had. Quentin’s legs jerk against their restraints as these low guttural sounds issue uncontrollably from his throat with every breath like it’s just too much for his body to take silently, Eliot on him and in him, two fingers now stretching him open, the sensation and the promise in his memory of _more_ , the entire secret center of him coiling tight and hot and good, so good, incredible — Eliot working him like a spell, like he’s fucking clay in Eliot’s hands, another finger now with a burn that makes him hiss, makes him cry out as his body gives way and it only feels good, feels right — his hips are jerking wildly fucking into Eliot’s mouth, fucking himself on Eliot’s hand, every muscle drawing tight, tight, tight as he gets closer, so goddamn close —

And then Eliot straightens up and slips his hand out and rests back on his knees, eyeing Quentin with a wicked smirk.

“El,” Quentin says, breathless. His hole is fucking screaming for something to fill it and his dick is so hard it hurts. “What the fuck.”

“You’re too good, Q,” Eliot says, somehow both praise and reprimand. Quentin is going to have an aneurysm. “Listening to how goddamn desperate you were for me, feeling your greedy cock fuck into my mouth — it got me going again, darling.” He makes a fist around his own cock, once more red-dark and erect. Quentin is dimly aware that his mouth is hanging unattractively open. “I thought about waiting it out, but then I figured — you’re fucking mine.” His voice, possessive and scraped raw — Quentin’s eyes flutter briefly shut. “So I can do whatever the fuck to you I want. Right?”

Quentin considers saying, _NO you cannot leave me hanging five milliseconds away from the most mind-blowing orgasm of my life just to play stupid head games some more, what are you, some kind of sociopath?_ Eliot would probably laugh and get back to blowing him, maybe draw it out just a little longer to be annoying. Quentin would get off and then they’d be able to proceed with clear brains.

He says, “Anything, El. You can do anything to me.”

“Good boy,” Eliot says, and it is a miracle that Quentin doesn’t come all over himself right there.

Eliot undoes his binds with a single complicated set of tuts, sending them floating over to the nightstand. Why is it so hot, Quentin wonders, to watch him doing magic, like he’s seen hundreds of times before? All that competence and effortless grace in his mesmerizing hands. “Turn over,” Eliot commands lazily. “On your knees.”

Quentin hustles to obey.

“I’m going to fuck you,” Eliot says. That imperious tone in his voice — _fuck_. “And you’re not going to get off until I fucking say you can. Got it?”

Quentin nods, too turned on to speak.

Eliot gives him a sharp smack on the ass. “I said, got it?”

“I got it,” Quentin manages. “I — I’m not coming until you tell me, I — fuck — yes, please —”

But Eliot doesn’t start fucking him just yet; he hits him again, not too hard, but Quentin is so far gone that it’s enough to send his head swimming. Eliot murmurs, almost to himself, “You really do have _such_ a spankable ass.”

Quentin rolls his eyes. “You know I hate that word.”

Eliot laughs, a clear happy sound. “Sorry, must have been distracted.” He gives Quentin one last friendly smack and then — fuck, _then_ — he pushes his dick in. In, in, _in_ , fuck it’s so _big_ , filling Quentin up so thick and good — and then he pulls out, what the _fuck_.

“Eliot,” Quentin says, strangled, and lightly, like he’s not doing this on purpose to drive Quentin totally insane, Eliot says, “You know what, changed my mind — flip back over, I want to see you —”

“I’m gonna kill you,” Quentin says, but he flops back over onto his back, hiking his knees up for a better angle.

Eliot slips between his legs, pushes in again quicker this time; once he’s there Quentin’s irritation evaporates. “No, you’re not.”

“No,” Quentin agrees, resigned, exalted, in love, “I’m not.”

Eliot starts fucking him in earnest, thrusting quick and steady until Quentin’s boneless and heated beneath him and then — going _deeper_ , holy god, how is it every time Eliot pulls this Quentin is somehow still surprised when there’s more? Hitting him hard and deep, luminous eyes watching Quentin twist and moan wordlessly with every inch, sweat dripping down his face — he’s the most perfect thing Quentin’s ever seen. Don’t come, he reminds himself, not until Eliot tells you —

“You’re so pretty,” Eliot says, sounding almost wretched about it and Quentin loves that, loves the way Eliot loves to look at him, can’t believe he ever thought he didn’t, “you’re so fucking pretty, Q, so pretty when we’re fucking like this —”

Quentin’s cock throbs. “El — oh, _fuck_ —”

“So pretty when you’re all mine,” Eliot says, “the fucking prettiest —”

“El,” Quentin tries again, “I can’t hold off — I’m gonna come —”

He’s half-expecting Eliot to give him permission so the two of them can come while fucking, tangled up hot and close. But Eliot’s fucking committed. He pulls out, leaving Quentin aching, god, his dick feels like a fucking nuclear bomb. “It’s me first tonight,” Eliot says, with put-on coldness that’s so unlike him Quentin’s thighs clench to hear it.

Eliot sits back fisting himself furiously, face wrenching like he’s too close to care what he looks like. Quentin thinks about moving to touch his dick to see what Eliot would do — something terrifyingly hot, undoubtedly — but he’s transfixed by the sight of Eliot pumping himself like some horny nobody watching porn, like Quentin’s unraveled him so thoroughly he can’t focus on anything but how bad he wants to get off — his orgasm drawing closer, the anticipation stirring Quentin’s blood —

“On me,” he says suddenly, “El, I want you to come on me — I want you all over me, making me yours —”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Eliot groans, giving a lurching nod. Face twisting he adjusts his angle and jerks himself fast and hard and then — comes on Quentin’s chest and belly and one electric spot on his face, the liquid striping him in warm streaks that land like fire on his skin.

Eliot’s so fucking beautiful after he comes — languid and peaceful, relaxation emanating from his entire body, face softened with a dazed little smile like he forgot to notice it was there. “Sorry,” he says, leaning over with his thumb out to wipe the come off where it landed on Quentin’s face, low on his cheek. “My aim wasn’t exactly the greatest.”

Instead of answering in words, Quentin turns his head when Eliot traces a careful path along his skin and catches his thumb in his mouth, licking it clean with an undignified moan. Judging from the way Eliot’s eyes widen, it gets the message across.

Slowly, barely breathing, Eliot brings his hand to a liquid streak on Quentin’s chest, diagonally across his pec. Slowly he picks up his own come with two fine-boned fingers, index and third, and lifts his hand into the air, looking wonderingly at Quentin. Quentin nods, because — he wants it. Wants every part of Eliot he can lick and swallow and taste and touch and have. The two of them closer than close, nothing between, that flayed-open _yes_ that says: _I’m yours. Every single piece. No going back._

Eliot slips his fingers wet with come into Quentin’s mouth and Quentin sucks, licks, bites at him, holding Eliot’s gaze all the while. Eliot shivers as he drags his fingers out of Quentin’s mouth, then dips back to Quentin’s abdomen for more, smearing some of it on Quentin’s bottom lip for him to lick off before shoving his dirty fingers in Quentin’s mouth. Quentin feels fucking drugged, world blurring around the strain in his cock and Eliot’s fingers on his teeth and the heartbeat that says _yes, yes, yes_. Again Eliot does this, over and over, ritualistically, until he’s cleaned Quentin off and Quentin’s gratefully eaten every bit off his hands.

“You’re perfect,” Eliot says, hushed.

“I’m yours,” Quentin says. 

Eliot kisses him, tender, luxurious. Then he scoots back down Quentin’s body, kneeling between his legs. “How do you want to come?” he says. “Whatever you want.”

Quentin is about thirty seconds from coming at nothing at all, but he pulls it together enough to say, “Your mouth.”

Eliot opens up and takes him in again and it’s over almost before it starts, Quentin’s hips jerking wildly as soon as he’s been given permission to chase his overdue release, coming blindingly hard and long with a fucked-out groan from the back of his throat, gripping Eliot’s dark hair as he trembles through the aftershocks. Eliot keeps his head in place until he’s sure Quentin is done.

“So,” he says, “how was that?”

“Fuck you,” says Quentin, laughing. “Holy _shit_ , El.”

“The feeling, I assure you, is very much mutual.” Eliot casts an all-purpose clean-up spell and then hoists himself up to the top of the bed to collapse next to Quentin.

Quentin curls up against him, nestling his head into the crook of Eliot’s neck, damp with sweat. Eliot loops an arm around his shoulder. He feels like someone took a rolling pin to his whole body and then stuck him in the oven to bake fresh. “I love you,” he says. “And your huge dick.”

Eliot laughs. “I love you, too. And your eminently respectable cock.” Quentin swats at his chest without much feeling. “And — god, your fucking mouth — a longstanding favorite of mine, but I really must say — the things that have been coming out of it lately — Jesus, Q.”

Quentin hums in happy agreement. Eliot strokes slowly along his arm.

In an uncertain voice, Eliot says, “Should I feel weird about that?”

Quentin shifts to look at him. “About liking it when I — what, talk dirty?” Unforgivably stupid phrase. “Why would that be weird? I feel like that’s gotta be in the top three most normal things about sleeping with me.”

Eliot shrugs, eyes downcast. “I don’t know. It’s — a change. To drastically understate the matter.”

“Feels like a pretty good change to me,” Quentin says. “You don’t think so?” He wonders if Eliot feels — what, less useful now? That would be stupid, but unfortunately plausible.

“Obviously I’m enjoying it,” says Eliot. “But, I mean — it is a skill you seem to have developed in the throes of a massive nervous breakdown. I feel like it’s not insane for me to worry that I’m, like, getting off on some symptom of your post-traumatic stress.”

Quentin laughs. He doesn’t mean to, because Eliot is being kind of serious and very sweet, but — it’s just such a funny thing to be worried about. “I think it’s fine,” he says. “I feel good about it. I think that means you can feel good about it, too. And it’s not a _symptom_ , it’s — I mean, yeah, okay, it’s not totally disconnected from the time I lost my fucking mind, but —”

He rests his head on Eliot’s chest, trying to find the words. Eliot keeps moving his hand up and down Quentin’s arm and it feels cozy and calm. Quentin relaxes in the warmth of his palm and the beating of his heart and the post-sex sleepiness and he looks around at the stone walls, the flickering torches, the armoire and the four-poster bed. The room where it all fell apart, two years ago now — that’s how it felt, at the time. He walked in here one day and when he left his life was over. But that wasn’t right, was it? He’d been teetering on the edge of some scary fucking shit for a long time before that — since he’d come back from the dead. Longer, even — how the fuck else had he died in the first place? The abyss was at his feet; he just didn’t want to see. Eliot didn’t destroy anything except the illusion that Quentin was okay. And when he looks back on it now, it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like something started that night, and it just took him a while to figure that out.

“Things were so bad when I left New York,” he says. “I’d been so fucked up for so long. More than I even really knew. And I was handling it — terribly, just being totally awful, and I’m still sorry about all the fucked up shit I pulled on you back then. I was trying to find some way to explain how shitty I felt that wouldn’t make me — look at what I’d actually done, who I actually was. Thinking that if I could just — drive far enough, maybe I could put the past in the fucking rearview. And I was wrong about that — I was wrong that I could run away from my problems, and I was wrong that it was your fault, and I was wrong that I could somehow — separate out all the shit that had happened to me from all the shit I’d done. I was wrong about basically everything it’s possible for a human being to be wrong about, but — I wasn’t wrong that I needed to change. I didn’t know how, or if I even could, and I made a shit-ton of mistakes in trying to figure out — how to become a version of myself I could actually survive being, and I wish — _god_ , I fucking wish I’d managed to get it together without hurting you or anyone else along the way. More than anything, I wish that. But —” He takes a breath. In, and out. Eliot has stilled his hand on the back of Quentin’s neck, fingers raking softly through his hair. “The part of me that felt like, I need to start doing shit differently — that part was right. And it’s funny because — I’d kind of been thinking of that as the part of me that wanted to die, and — and maybe it was, but — maybe it was the part of me that wanted to live, too. Because what I was doing before — that wasn’t working. That wasn’t — a life I could live. And now I have that, and — I don’t know how else I would’ve made it here, except for how I did. Fucked-up shit and all.”

He lifts his head to look at Eliot again, who’s watching him quiet and still. He’s such a good listener. “So two years ago, I was having a nervous breakdown. I was depressed and drinking way too fucking much and like kind of low-key trying to die. But I think — I think I was trying to live, too. I mean I must have been, right? Or I — wouldn’t have. And it was a winding fucking road, but — El, I really like where I wound up. And that’s — god, a _lot_ of shit has gone into that, like, I don’t even feel like I totally understand how it happened, but — part of it is, I’m not scared of what I want anymore. I feel like — however that started, whatever weird fucked-up shape it took — where I am now, it can’t be anything but good.”

“That sounds good to me,” Eliot says. He’s looking a little misty-eyed, and kind of — proud, which is embarrassing, but also — nice. It’s nice.

“In conclusion,” Quentin says, settling back down against him, “when I start running my mouth about how I want you to bend me over gagged and tell me how sick I am for liking it, you can feel free to enjoy that with a clear conscience.”

“Good to know,” Eliot says drily. “Should I put that in my calendar for next week?”

Quentin smiles. “I dunno, I might go really nuts and vote for some tender missionary instead. Keep things fresh, you know?”

“So unpredictable,” says Eliot, voice amused and approving and full of love.

“That’s me,” says Quentin. Which sounds crazy, but looking at the past couple years, like — it’s kind of true.

*

“I liked your book.”

Jane looks up from the game board with a smile. “Did you?”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. She places a white stone down. “It was — I don’t know. Kind of hard to read in parts. I mean it’s a sad story, you and — your family.”

She nods. “We were dealt a difficult hand.”

“But I liked — how honest it was, I guess,” he says. “The way you lay out — what you did, and why, and all the times you weren’t sure. It felt — brave. And, and _real_ — true to how fucked up Fillory is, but also just true to like, life. You’re a good writer.”

“Thank you,” she says. “That means a great deal.”

“I can guess why I would have hated it, back when I was at Brakebills.” God — it feels like a dozen lifetimes since.

“And why do you think that was?” says Jane, with that funny twist of her mouth.

“Because.” He taps his fingers on the table, studying the board. “You wrote about Fillory the way it really is, and I — I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be what it was when I was a kid. This perfect little bubble of escape.” Quentin places his piece down. “Have you ever thought about trying to get it out into the world? Set the record straight?”

“A long time ago,” she says. “When I started it. But by the time I finished, I had other things to worry about. And I realized that wasn’t really why I’d written it. I wrote it — so that my story would be mine again. And now I feel it is.”

“Still,” he says, “I know you’re stuck here, but — I could, I don’t know, ask around. I mean, the audience is kind of limited to magicians, although that won’t be a limit forever, and I don’t know how Margo would feel about it from a P. R. standpoint, but — it’s a good book. And it’s — it feels important. The truth about Fillory, but also — your story.” He feels like the book deserves to be read. Like she deserves to be heard.

“I do appreciate the sentiment,” she says. “But I promise you, I’m content for my story to live with me. And Fillory is changing by the day — my version of it may not be designed for a children’s story, but it’s no longer quite so close to the actual place.”

Quentin thinks about the place Whitespire is working to make Fillory be — better than it was, for certain. Maybe better than the books, too, one day. Beautiful in a way you can grow up with. “It’s funny — as shitty as the real thing can be, a part of me still kind of feels like — the idea of Fillory saved my life. The idea that — as fucked up as I was, as broken as i was, I could still — find a place away from all that — I know it doesn’t work like that, and it’s not, like, healthy or whatever, but — if it kept me going long enough to let it go, then — I don’t know. Maybe it was worth something, that idea. Even if it — wasn’t real.”

“Mmm.” Jane picks up a stone, twirls it in her fingers, then places it decisively. “Certainly it was worth something, but Quentin — ideas don’t _do_ anything. They just are.”

Quentin puts a stone down. “I don’t follow.”

“Ideas are like ambient,” she says. “There’s power there, absolutely. It can be a useful tool. But it won’t cast a spell by itself. For that, you need a magician. To save a life, you need someone to — to take action.”

“But who?” says Quentin. “Who’s the, the magician in this analogy?”

“You tell me,” she says.

Quentin thinks — all the way back to the hospital that first time. “My dad,” he says, throat tight, thinking of his father, lost and confused and — god, he must have been just fucking terrified; but he’d brought the books anyway, because he loved his son and that was one thing he could do. “And Julia,” he adds, because Julia was the first one who made him believe — in Fillory, in the earthly miracle of having someone by his side, in a world that existed for him to return to once he made it out.

“Who else?”

“There wasn’t anyone else,” says Quentin. “It was just — oh.”

Jane’s smile deepens. “Yes. _Oh_.”

There was just him. Him tangled up in the mess of his head, the wreckage of his heart; him fighting his way out of the dark. Using whatever he could grab onto to pull himself back into daylight. All the love he was given, holding onto it in shaking hands, and — and all the love inside him, too. The love that felt stupid and too big for his body, the wanting that scared him and the care that felt like pain — his love, flickering and uncertain and foolish and his, keeping his heart beating until he could learn to carry it right.

Saving his life.

“Well,” he says, hoarse. “Shit.”

“Indeed,” says Jane. She makes her next move. “You know, you don’t need my book to tell the world what really happened here, if that’s something you want.”

”What do you mean?” he says.

“I mean that story’s like a spell, remember?” She tilts her head. “If no one’s crafted the spell you want —”

“You write your own,” he finishes. His heart flutters. “You think I should — but I’m not, like — I mean things are a lot more chill now but I’m kind of enjoying this phase of my life where Fillory is like, C-plot at most, no offense, I don’t really think I’m the person to — like I’m not an expert on what’s going on, and it feels kind of like personally regressive, maybe, to dive back in or whatever — and it’s not — like what would I even _say_ , I’m not a, a — like, I wouldn’t know how.”

Jane shrugs easily. “If you don’t want to, don’t do it. But — you didn’t say you don’t want to.”

“No,” realizes Quentin, “I didn’t.” And he doesn’t — he doesn’t want this, does he? But — there’s something there. Something that won’t quite be let go of.

He picks up a piece, absently dematerializing and rematerializing it as he weaves it through his fingers like he might do with a coin. The buzzing in Jane’s cottage is back — that weird hum heard with something beyond his ears. “What’s that sound here?” he asks. “It’s like a weird — mosquito, or something.”

Jane smiles at him. “You hear it, too. The others don’t, when they come here — but I suppose I should have guessed. The cottage at the Clock Barrens is a place where all moments exist at once. Generally for those accustomed to unidirectional time, it feels the same as any other place, but — certain experiences, once inhabited, alter your perceptual structures so that they pick up on — certain frictions, one could say.”

“So what am I hearing?” says Quentin.

“It’s your death,” says Jane. “I don’t hear mine at all normally, but when I inhabit this linear consciousness — there it is. In the background, humming along. Bit of an annoyance, the first few times I shifted, but — you learn to live with it. Don’t you.”

Quentin holds the black stone and in his hand and takes a deep breath — in, out. Listening to — his death, at the edges of him, nowhere he can touch or see but still there. Still a part of him; still and maybe always. The fact of it and the person who made that choice and the person who had to live with it after — had to live and live and live, until he’d made himself a life. He’d been so sure, he remembers now, his death would always be the best thing he would ever do. He hasn’t believed that for a long time now. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess you do.”

*

When he gets back home, Quentin sits on the porch overlooking the bay with a mug of coffee and his laptop open to a blank document. At the top he writes:

 _Once upon a time, there was a boy_.

Then he deletes that because, like, that’s a level of cliché where even attempting to subvert it is by now overdone to the point of total affective dilution, and also _boy_ makes it sound like he’s twelve. Thinking for a second, he types:

 _This is a story about Fillory, but not the one you know_.

Then he deletes that, too, because, like — he’s not really sure it is, yet. He’s not really sure it’s _anything_ yet, and Jane was right when she said he didn’t not want to write about Fillory, but that’s not the same as wanting to write about it, because Fillory seems kind of like potentially limiting as a framework, or whatever. Not inherently, but like, for him. And — a prickle of embarrassment travels up his neck — that’s what this is really about, right? He wants to write about — him. Not necessarily, like, _him_ -him, like he’s not setting out to pen his fucking memoirs or whatever, or — he doesn’t know what he’s doing. So maybe he should stop trying to be cute about it and just get to the fucking point. Something like:

 _This is a story about me_.

Except, like, way to announce yourself as an insufferable narcissist from page one. He tries again:

_This is a story about ~~death~~._  
_This is a story about ~~life~~._  
_This is a story about ~~the guy who saved the world~~._  
_This is a story about ~~being born again, but not in the creepy fundamentalist way~~._  
_This is a story about ~~pain~~._  
_This is a story about ~~friendship~~._  
_This is a story about ~~California~~._  
_This is a story about ~~love, but it’s not a love story. Well, it’s kind of a love story, but not like a normal one. I mean like two people fall in love and live happily ever after, so far, as much as that kind of tropey fairytale concept can be applied to actual reality, but — whatever, you’ll see~~._  
_This is a story about ~~broken objects~~._  
_This is a story about ~~fixing things~~._  
_This is a story about ~~what we talk about when we talk about running. Oh shit that’s a Murakami book~~_  
_This is a story about ~~luck~~._  


Quentin stares at the blinking cursor in the expanse of white, drumming his fingers on the wooden table. It’s still there, he notices — that impulse to run from the uncertain path, the voice ungently telling him to shut the laptop and maybe throw it into the ocean for good measure and spend the rest of the afternoon nursing a beer or six in bed. The part of him that would rather cling to what he knows even when it’s small and cold than let go to make space for something wild and strange and new. That looks at what he wants and only ever says: _You can’t_.

The water is shining; the air is warm. He’s drinking coffee he brewed with a pot made of ceramic and potential and his own power. Something he couldn’t imagine making until he was holding it in his hands.

He closes the laptop and walks inside.

When he returns he has a notebook and a pencil, spelled with Vesic’s Blade to keep sharp. He turns to a fresh page and he writes:

 _This is a story about magic_.

And looking at it, he thinks — maybe it’s not perfect, but he can live with it for now.

Then he writes.

He writes about Fillory, kind of, about the place and the idea, the kid who wanted to believe and the nominal adult who stumbled into the splendor and horror of the real deal, Plover’s books and Jane’s tragedy and Margo’s kingdom, which turns into writing about Brakebills, where he thought his life was finally beginning and he was kind of wrong but kind of right, too. He writes about the things Brakebills did right and got wrong, about the texture and shape and scope of magic it took him years to start to see, about spellcraft and vernacular casting and collaborative work and the power in transformation. He writes about his friends and their enemies, about guilt and fear and broken hearts. About the subway in New York and the diner he and Julia used to go to uptown and why he left. About quests, about gods, about riding his bike on the boardwalk at Mission Beach. About magic and love and the ways they’re the same: they hurt and they heal. They’re hard, and they’re worth it. Monsters and mosaics, gardens and ghosts. He writes without lifting his pencil, without worrying about the end. One word in front of the other; messy handwriting filling up the pale blue lines. Like the night of his first breakthrough working on his spell, riding the conviction that if he could just get everything out then the shape of it would reveal itself to him over time. Trusting that he has something to say. 

When he wraps up his coffee is gone and the sun is setting over the bay. He flips back to the beginning and reads through what he’s put on the paper, five single-spaced pages back and front. The thing is like, completely incoherent, bordering on unhinged. Paragraphs start with an ostensible topic and veer wildly off-course; single sentences begin in one place and end up a world away. Sometimes it sounds like a diary or worse some kind of early-millennium blog, and sometimes like a sort of pretentious _New Yorker_ article, and sometimes like an academic essay, and sometimes like a novel. Also he uses the word _meta_ way too much, and a truly obscene number of semicolons. It’s a mess.

It’s a start.

Quentin has no idea if anything he’s written is remotely salvageable or how he’s ever going to shape it into something that makes sense, but he finds there’s intense satisfaction in having set something down. In looking at the words scattered on the page, and believing that one day he’ll figure out how to put them together in a way that shows something true. Even if it takes fifty years. There’s satisfaction in having said if nothing else: there’s a story worth telling here. A story that’s ugly and lovely and fucked up and wild and mine. And one day, I’m gonna find it.

*

On a cloudy day Quentin walks out to the beach with a stone in his pocket and waits. He probably should have come up with some kind of signal; it’s not actually raining. But he has a hunch —

“Little magician! A pleasure on this springtime morn.”

Behind him this time; she really does keep people on their toes. Quentin turns and smiles. “Edine. Hi.”

The selkie is wearing her sealskin as a bikini today. That’s — sure. “You look well,” she says. “The shadow of your melancholy seems to have blown away in an easterly breeze.”

“I’m pretty okay,” Quentin says agreeably. “I have something for you.” He takes out the stone and hands it to her, enjoying the way her eyes light up when she takes it in her graceful hands.

“Magician,” she says, awe in her voice, “is this what I believe it to be?”

“Yeah, it’s another mix,” he says.

Edine holds the enchanted rock to her heart, or where he assumes her heart is. He’s not an expert on selkie anatomy. “I will bring this back to my sisters with gratitude and praise.”

“I hope you like it,” says Quentin. “It’s the same kinda vibes, mostly” — he let Hannah pick some of the tracks this time, which definitely resulted in some curve balls — “but I thought you could use a chance to mix it up. Variety is the spice of life, and all.”

“A wise maxim.” Edine sits on the sand with a sidelong look. Quentin joins her, crossing his legs. “In fact we have been discussing this in my clan of late.”

“Oh yeah?” he says.

She nods. “The possibility has been raised of departing these waters. Setting off for somewhere new.”

“Oh wow,” Quentin says, surprised. “Is everything okay? I thought you guys liked it here.”

“We do,” she says. “And I do. But we have been here some time. And we remember still the year of our travels, with fondness and wonder. The world is large, little magician, full of creatures to meet and oceans to cross and shores to see. And we live many orbits of the sun. Long enough that we have time yet for a new story, if we choose.”

Quentin looks out at the water, gray and dull under the flat gray sky, and remembers the day she pulled him from the waves. Twenty-seven years old and drunk off his ass, as low as he’d ever felt. Trapped in a story too small to live in, looking out at the world like a prisoner behind glass. Seeing in its vastness only indifference and despair. Things were already changing then, and he didn’t even know. He had no idea what else was out there, once you stepped outside to look. He’ll be turning twenty-nine this summer, and he’s not afraid.

“Well, hey,” he says. “If you do move on, before you go you should let me know. Maybe we can set up a way to stay in touch. Check in once a year, or something. See what’s new.”

“That would please me,” says Edine, sounding almost shy. “I cherish our acquaintance.”

“Me, too,” says Quentin.

Edine says, “Would you care to refresh our carnal knowledge of each other’s intimate places?”

Quentin smiles. The thing is, he kind of feels like Eliot wouldn’t mind, and it really does barely count as sex in any of the usual ways, but — he’s kind of still enjoying the novelty of a reason to say no. It’s stupidly fun to say, “I can’t. I have a boyfriend, remember?”

“Ah, yes,” she says knowingly. “Humans and their mores.”

“We do have some of those,” says Quentin.

“Perhaps,” she says, “should we find new waters in which to make a home, I shall take a true paramour. I had thought such things were best left to my memory and my youth, but —” She leans in conspiratorially, even though they’re alone on the beach. “Witnessing the happiness of you and the one who holds your heart has ignited old longings once turned to ash.”

That’s — bizarrely sweet, actually. “I think you should go for it,” says Quentin. “If that’s what you want.”

“It may so be,” she says. “I fear, however, that it would prove difficult to secure in this era where contact is so diminished between our kinds.”

“Well, things are changing all the time,” he says. “And people are into all kinds of weird shit. Uh, not that you’re weird, but, you know — just don’t rule it out.” There’s gotta be someone out there whose dream girl is an ocean-dwelling living Barbie doll with magical powers and sex that feels like it’s happening inside out. Quentin doesn’t know who that person is, but he’s sure they exist. “It’s a big world out there, right?”

Edine’s eyes sparkle. “That it is, little magician. That it is.”

*

Quentin sits in the lot in La Jolla facing the terra cotta pot he brought to set near the Naturalist’s corner. A woman he doesn’t know is tending to some herbs a few yards down; on the other side there’s a group spelling chalk drawings to move across the pavement. Someone’s playing music, something with a driving pulse that Quentin doesn’t recognize floating a thrumming guitar riff through the air — _Damn, I’m in it — and I’ve been trying to find my way back for a minute..._. He pulls out of his pocket the object he’s chosen to offer up as a trial — a pencil, snapped in half — and raises his hands to begin the spell.

He can feel it as soon as he starts to cast — the vibrancy of the ambient here, its wildness and strange currents. He’s felt it before but it’s more pronounced, working a spell this involved. It’s not like the jagged chaos of Fillory’s magic; he doesn’t need to corral it or find a way to keep it contained. It wants to work with him, he realizes. It wants to be part of something real.

He asks: _What do you want?_

The answer is — bigger than he would have expected. It comes in waves of color — vivid greens, sunrise pinks. Bright blues like the ocean on a sunny day. Quentin hears singing, and snatches of laughter, and hissing and clattering kitchen sounds like breakfast cooking. He sees a face that he thinks looks like one of the little-girl ghosts no longer walking their sad paths, and an undulating movement like waves on the shore, or wings in flight. Fresh apples, flowers unfurling for the open sky. Music pounding in tandem with his heart. And beneath it all a glistening thread of hope or of desire, something that aches and strains but feels good, too, feels right and almost holy in its truth — a strand of bright pure _yes_ , stretching far past where Quentin can reach.

He holds the magic for a minute, feeling like he’s holding — his spell, and something more. The legacy of the ghosts, the careful work that untethered them from their miserable loop, and what the space they left behind has grown within it these past few months, and what it might yet be. Like he’s holding all this effort, and the sorrow, but the joy of it, too, terror and miracle woven into one dazzling apparition called life. The past, his past, the heaviness and magic of what brought him here, and the future too big to look at, revealing itself slowly with every forward step. All these pieces brought together at the nexus in his hands, the place where what’s inside him meets the world.

Quentin has no idea how any of that is supposed to manifest in a fucking pencil. But, like — that’s the process, right? In two weeks he’ll have more — more data, more understanding, more ideas for where to go next. More of the future, as long as he shows up to claim it. Wingtip-cross, and he closes out. 

*

The house fills up quickly in the evening. Quentin’s a little worried about how many people are showing up, given that he promised Beth everyone would be on their best behavior until she and Hannah Traveled back to her dorm, but the guests are managing to keep it chill. Which he should have known, probably; the parties they throw are typically fun but in a distinctly grown-up kind of way, attended by people who drink like they have shit to do in the morning. It’s not like they’re on frat row, thank god.

Eliot brings a crateful of supplies and keeps offering to mix people something to their liking, which results in a suspiciously high number of drinks in circulation bearing a familiar signature green and a mocktail for Hannah glowing bright blue; Quentin suspects he’s missed playing bartender. There’s something weirdly moving about seeing his hands carrying out the practiced movements, his lips curling as he passes a glass for an experimental sip, the sincere delight crinkling his eyes at another satisfied customer — something about the memory of a time when Eliot thought this was Eliot at his best, and the knowledge that Eliot’s finally figured out how much more he has to give, and the sweetness of being able to slip into that role, still, now that it’s one option among many and not the end of his story. Or maybe Quentin just thinks everything about Eliot is weirdly moving, because he’s in love. It’s kind of hot, watching his easy competence, his confident charm turned all the way up with that one curl falling in his forehead. Quentin gets to take this person home, man. That hasn’t gotten old. He doesn't think it ever will.

Once he lets himself trust in Beth’s elder-sister judgment and chaperoning skills enough to relax, Quentin realizes he’s enjoying himself. There are friends, and friendly acquaintances, and interesting strangers; laughter and fairy lights and Ray’s ridiculously good French onion dip. Music pouring out of the speakers, a yearning sax like a clarion call inviting them to some nebulous surrender — _Oh, baby — take me to the feeling_ …. It’s not a royal blowout in a magic kingdom-turned-evolving-democracy, but Quentin thinks he might appreciate it more in its simplicity. In how easy it feels to look around and think: tonight, he doesn’t need anything more than this. A room filled with people he loves who don’t have anything to do right now except be with each other. It’s taken him so long to be glad for simple things.

This is his life, he thinks, and there’s so much joy in the thought that he feels like he could shatter. Like his body is still learning how to let happiness be.

He catches Luisa’s eye as she’s moving some of the back-up snacks out of the kitchen and onto the table. “Hey,” he says. “You up for a walk down the beach?”

Luisa nudges a tray of mini-muffins into place. “Yeah, sure. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s great,” he assures her. “Just — could use some air, you know?”

“I do know,” she says, smiling, and Quentin will never stop being grateful that she always does.

The night is warm and still once they slip out the sliding door onto the porch. They walk in companionable silence across the dunes, taking off their shoes when they reach the surf before turning to walk towards the edge of the selkies’ territory. Quentin feels — not better, exactly; he was feeling good before. But the fullness of the night, of the past weeks, of his whole life right now was vibrating under his skin like an earthquake, like he could feel suddenly the friction of his own tectonic plates, and now in the near-empty darkness of the new-moon sky he can feel it settling into his bones, making a shape he knows how to carry. The water feels soft rushing over the skin of his feet. Brushing his ankles.

When they reach the familiar boundary Luisa takes her towel out of her purse with an inquiring eyebrow and after he nods they spread it out to sit on it, looking out at the invisible horizon beyond the waves. It’s a good night, Quentin thinks; he feels more used to it already.

“So what’s up?” says Luisa.

Quentin could say _Nothing in particular_ ; he wasn’t thinking about anything specific when he got the impulse to walk. But that’s not quite true. “The last time I was in New York,” he says, “I met with that professor of Rishi’s from college — Juno Green.”

“I remember,” Luisa says. “You guys talked about your work. It sounded really cool.”

“Yeah,” says Quentin. He looks at Luisa sideways. “She offered me a job.”

Luisa’s eyebrows shoot up. “Holy shit, really?”

He nods. He still can’t totally believe it, either. “It’s technically not an official offer yet, since her department’s budget isn’t finalized, but. She seemed pretty confident the money would be there.”

“What would you be doing?” Luisa asks.

“Research assistant,” he says, “in the physical lab at Ravensdale. I’d be looking through the literature for relevant precedent, compiling data, running trials, that kind of thing. She works mostly around mending — her discipline’s actually the same as mine, but her research deals a lot with finding ways to integrate mending with other branches of magic. Last year she fixed a stapler by making it fly.”

“Wow,” says Luisa, sounding impressed.

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s super cool shit. And the way she described it, she made it sound like I’d be able to use their resources to pursue my own projects, too, if I wanted. I mean it’s a one-year position, but she was talking about — helping me design my program of study, that kind of thing. I think she sees it as kind of a gateway into their doctoral program. Like she thinks I could get my PhD there. And, like — wants me to.”

“Of course she does,” Lusia says. Quentin smiles. “So are you gonna take it?”

Quentin picks at his cuticle. “I’d be crazy not to, right?”

She narrows her eyes knowingly. “That’s not actually an answer to the question that I asked.”

“No,” he agrees, “it’s not.” She doesn’t say anything; giving him time, he knows, and loves her for it all over again. The waves spread and retreat with their rhythmic hushing on the dark sand. “Part of me is like — yeah, absolutely, let’s fucking do it. You know, I was going to go to grad school, like regular grad school, before Brakebills found me, and it’s funny because back then I don’t know that I was really — making a choice that made sense, there. Like I kind of thought, okay, school’s like the thing I suck at least in life, and I don’t really want to deal with the real world, so — sure. Philosophy. I didn’t really think through the reality of it, like, will I _like_ this?” He hadn’t thought there was anything he liked that could ever be worthwhile. “But now, it’s like — I like magic, and I like _thinking_ about it, about — how it works, kind of, although I’m not in love with theory for theory’s sake the way someone like Julia is — but I like thinking about how it works to see what else I can get it to do. I like — researching and experimenting and, and writing about this shit, and talking to people who are into it — and I like, you know. Teaching. Working with someone, to try to figure out — how to get them to do what they can do… that’s fun for me. And that’s all, you know — that’s what academia kind of is.”

“What about the other part of you?” Luisa asks.

Quentin leans back on his hands, palms sinking into the soft sand. “But then it’s like, have I really spent the past year working with — you and Julia and Kady and Penny and everyone else, with people I don’t even _know_ but who are all part of this, this movement kind of, to get rid of gatekeepers and spread magic as wide as it will go and bring all kinds of methods and modalities into the conversation — like I’m really gonna do all this, like, unlearning and reconceptualizing and paradigm-shifting just to wind up back in a fucking school? That feels — off, kind of. And Ravensdale’s a shitload more progressive than Brakebills — she was telling me about some of the outreach stuff they do in the city, it’s really fucking cool, and that could be, like, another way to be involved, but — I don’t know. Plus — it starts in the fall, and I know Beth’s looking for jobs in the area but what if she can’t find one, and frankly even if she can, like — I don’t know, I feel weird just kind of — bailing on Hannah like that, after a couple months. I know — I know Beth can take care of her, but like — she shouldn’t have to do that alone, right? And I’ve gotten — kind of attached, I guess.”

“You’re not the only one,” says Luisa. “She’s got people in her corner. And for you — there’s texting, email. Also the fact that she’s a literal Traveler. You could move back East and still stay in touch.”

“That’s true,” he says. “There’d be some logistics to manage, but — I guess I spend a lot of time managing logistics already.” He crosses his ankles, legs outstretched. Watching the bay.

Curiously Luisa says, “Is that all? Or is there something else?” 

Quentin taps his feet together. He wonders what the selkies are up to now. If later tonight they’ll be singing. How much longer they’ll stay. “The plan was always to go back to New York,” he says. “I didn’t come here expecting to spend the rest of my life in San Diego. I like New York. I have friends there. Eliot’s there, as much as he is anywhere on Earth, and it’d be nice to have a space that’s — ours, even if it’s just the room we sleep in at night. And eventually there’ll be, like, kids in the mix, so that’ll kind of — be a whole thing. Parenting is hard enough without doing it bicoastally, or whatever. So — moving back makes sense.”

“But?” she prompts.

“But — I like it here, too,” he says. “Honestly more than I ever expected. There’s a lot of things I love about — being here, with you guys, in the house, near Hannah, in the city, all of it. Things I’ll miss. I’m not in a rush to say goodbye. And…” He hesitates; she lets him think. A breeze blows past the beach. “I came here to fix my life, because my life was — it didn’t work. It was way beyond not working. And I kind of, like, did? I mean things aren’t perfect, nobody’s life is perfect, but — I feel really fucking okay, which for me is really fucking miraculous. I wake up in the morning and I’m — I’m glad to be alive, which, if you had told me that two years ago…” He shakes his head. “I did that here. And I really — I didn’t have a fucking back-up plan. I still don’t know — what else I would’ve done, where else I could’ve gone, if this hadn’t worked. And I guess maybe — maybe there’s a part of me that’s — scared, to leave. Because what if — what if I go back out there, and the carriage is a pumpkin, and it turns out that back in New York, I’m still the same asshole who fucked everything up so bad to begin with?”

Luisa takes a deep breath, a sound like the waves. Like she knows exactly the fear he’s naming. She gives him a crooked smile. “The week you moved in, Toni asked me if you’d pissed off a night hag, and it had put a sleeping curse on you. We barely saw you, that first month.”

Quentin remembers, more or less. A life reduced to four walls and a bottle of whatever he hoped might dull his senses enough to feel like an escape. It feels like a bad dream, repetitive and blurred. “Are you saying I’m not that guy anymore?”

“No,” she says softly. “I know how it goes — I know there are places that, once you’ve been there, no matter how far away you get, you never really feel like they’re gone for good. I’m saying — even that guy had what it took to get here. And now that you’ve done it, you know that you can.”

“Proof of concept,” he says.

“Yeah,” she says. “Look, I’m not saying — go, or don’t go. And I’m definitely not saying we don’t rule, because we do. But — you should give yourself some credit. Whatever you choose, whatever happens… you can handle it. I think you’re tougher than you think you are.”

Quentin thinks about Jane Chatwin’s cottage, the white-noise hum of his death. He thinks about the Seam, the place where he died, and all the places where he didn’t, even if he came close. The ways he got lucky, and the times he saved his own life. “Maybe you’re right.”

“So you’re gonna do it?” she says.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, the other stuff I said — about Hannah, about missing things — that’s all true, you know. It wasn’t just, like, bullshit excuses to cover for my fear of change, or whatever. I still kind of feel like — maybe I don’t want to decide that the endpoint of two years spent totally rewiring everything I know about magic is that I head back to academia at the first opportunity.”

“It doesn’t have to be an endpoint,” she says gently. “You can always come back, if it’s not what you wanted.”

He laughs, feeling caught out and grateful. Old fucking habits — still looking for the story he fits into, instead of listening to the one he’s learning to tell. He’s working on it. “That’s very true,” he says. “And if I said yes I’d have, you know, some flexibility with my summers — I can still do access work in my own time, that kind of thing.”

“Yeah,” she says. “You’ll figure it out. Whatever you decide.”

Quentin looks at the waves crashing on the shore, always the same and each one new. He thinks of Fillory, then — of the way he loved it before. A place that never changed, which meant a place that didn’t need a future. He’d wanted to believe in that, so badly, because he couldn’t see a future he knew how to live; he couldn’t imagine a self who belonged there. He’d thought every change was something breaking, and he was kind of right, wasn’t he? The past cracking open to let in something new. But breaking doesn’t have to be the end of the story. He didn’t know that you become the person who belongs in your future in the process of building it, bit by bit. One foot in front of the other; one breath at a time.

“I think you might have saved my life,” he says. “The night we met — I was so fucked up, Luisa. Things were bad and getting worse and I couldn’t — I couldn’t pull out of it, I didn’t even know if I wanted to.” The nightmare cycle where he’d played along with acting like the bullshit hero everyone wanted him to be, because it hurt too much to be who he was. “I was drowning, and you threw me a lifeline, just by being — real. By talking to the person I actually was, and not — whatever else people saw, when they looked at me. Like you held up a mirror, and I could see, for half a second, where I really was. And coming after — where I’d been, what I’d done —” His throat tightens. It wasn’t the only thing that mattered, but god — it was huge. “I really, really don’t know where I’d be without that. I don’t think I want to know.”

“It helps me, too, you know,” she says. “To feel like — like if I had go through all that, at least I can — connect, with other people who’ve been there too.”

Quentin thinks about Hannah, scared of her own power in her bedroom at the house; about Xanthis planting her shattered heirloom in the garden of broken objects. About the twelfth fucking step. “I think I’m starting to see what you mean.”

She smiles at him. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too,” he says. He clears his throat. “Whenever I do go back — whether it’s in September, or in another couple years — I’m really gonna miss you. We’ll stay in touch, obviously, but — you know.”

“Mmm.” She presses her lips together, eyes twinkling. “You might not have to miss me that much.” Quentin raises an eyebrow. Bursting into a grin she says, “I got a job offer, too.”

“No way,” he says. “What? When? Where?”

“I just heard back yesterday,” she says. “It’s a conservation project on the Hudson. Really cool work, developing magic to help aquatic wildlife cope with rising water temperatures. Start date flexible, but probably in a few months.”

“Congratufuckinglations,” he says. “That sounds perfect for you.”

She wrinkles her nose. “It kind of does, doesn’t it?”

“Hey,” he says, “whether I’m heading back or not, between me and Eliot shacking up and the number of people who are full-time Team Fillory, if you need a place to stay, I’m pretty sure my friends have room. And the apartment is kind of sick, real-estate wise. It’s like an actual penthouse.”

“For real?” she says. 

“Yeah,” he says. “There’s no chore wheel, though. Well, maybe there is now. Honestly, maybe there was before and I just — didn’t notice. You _might_ get pulled in to run an errand every couple months for the Baba Yaga, though. She’s technically the landlord.”

“That sounds kind of rad,” she says.

“It has its pros and cons,” he says. “No pressure, obviously, if you’d rather like, abandon the joys of communal living for the wonder of personal space.”

“You know I’m too much of a hippie for that,” she says. “But I don’t know if I’ll take it yet.”

“No?”

She shrugs. “I’ve got shit to miss here, too. There are projects and plans I’d like to see through, including, yeah, Hannah’s, like, high school graduation or whatever. Plus I haven’t had to deal with an actual winter since I was twenty.”

“It’s hard,” he says, “trying to choose between two things that both seem good.”

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she says, teasing. “To me, that seems like a pretty good problem to have.”

Quentin laughs. “I guess you’re right.” He stands up, dusts sand off the back of his jeans. “Ready to head back?” He holds his hand out.

She takes it, pulling herself to her feet. “If you are.”

“I’m ready,” he says.

Together they walk back along the surf foaming around their ankles, the pulse of the bay like lungs breathing air in and out, and Quentin thinks: he is ready. Ready for his future, hazy as the nighttime horizon and open just as wide. Ready for the life he knows by now he wants to live. Ready for the whole huge scope of the world, which feels so much warmer now that he knows in his cells he’s a part of it, too; small and graceless and connected to something vast. The expanse that once reflected at him only his own insignificance feels now like an invitation, like the cosmos itself is beckoning: _Come on in, the water’s fine_. Like the water hasn’t changed, but he trusts himself to swim. As they walk he looks down at his feet, watching the waves do what waves do. Breaking, and breaking, and breaking again, and always remaking themselves whole.

When they step back into the mint-green house by the bay, Luisa gets called over by a book club friend to settle some playfully heated dispute. Quentin hangs back a moment, just observing. On the couch Penny’s teaching Hannah and Beth some jointly worked energy spells, grinning gleefully at Hannah’s excitement whenever they get something right. Kady and Cynthia are embroiled in a fiercely competitive card game with Nico and Ray, and from the smirk on Kady’s face it looks like the prognosis is an ass-kicking. Margo has a hand in Josh’s hand and an arm snaked around Toni’s waist, rolling her eyes above a fond smile while Toni and Josh enthuse about the versatility of worm castings. Rishi and Alice are talking animatedly by the snack table, shy laughter threading through their conversation like bubbles in champagne; he keeps raking his hair back, and she’s pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose way more than the usual amount.

No one’s life is perfect, but tonight Quentin wouldn’t trade one single piece of his. Not for the loveliest story ever told.

In a corner Eliot and Julia are talking close, brows drawn in mirrored furrows. Quentin walks over to them, waving as he approaches. When they see him coming their faces open into matching smiles and he thinks: I am as lucky as anyone has ever been.

“Hey, you,” Eliot says, sliding a hand against Quentin’s waist; Quentin leans into him, enjoying the warmth of his body. “We were just wondering if we should start looking for you.”

“Sorry about that,” he says. “I was out with Luisa on the beach.”

“Everything okay?” says Julia.

He smiles at them: his best friend, his boyfriend. The people who have loved him better than anyone, who kept loving him even when his heart was too heavy to feel it. Now he’s brimming over with it — the gift of their love and the blessing of feeling his own love pouring out of him, easy as water. The promise of a whole future to keep loving them in. “Everything’s great.”

Eliot gives him a little squeeze. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Impulsively Quentin lifts up to kiss Eliot on the mouth, and leans over to kiss Julia on the cheek. The world is large; he wants to live. “I just needed a little time,” he says. “But now I'm here.”

**Author's Note:**

> title is [the hold steady](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFiiq2sFD7E), a song about walking around covered in broken glass. huge thanks again to everyone who read damage control, & especially to [propinquitous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/propinquitous/pseuds/propinquitous) and [cartographies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies) for truly superhuman amounts of talking & listening to me yell about this story; thank you also to everyone who's been reading along the way. every single comment i have received on this series in particular has meant more to me than i can say. i am [on tumblr](http://prettyboysdontlookatexplosions.tumblr.com); so is an [announcement post.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27025885/chapters/72409791)


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